[HN Gopher] How to Succeed in Mr Beast Production (Leaked PDF)
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How to Succeed in Mr Beast Production (Leaked PDF)
Author : babelfish
Score : 1880 points
Date : 2024-09-15 19:24 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (simonwillison.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (simonwillison.net)
| Firerouge wrote:
| 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
| jsheard wrote:
| _Willing to Die for MrBeast (and $5 Million)_
|
| https://archive.is/lDVoz
| walthamstow wrote:
| He blames Crowdstrike for his org treating humans like shit
| for money. Nice.
| Pedro_Ribeiro wrote:
| Is that all you got from the quote?
|
| "was unfortunately complicated by the CrowdStrike incident,
| extreme weather and other unexpected logistical and
| communications issues"
|
| "extreme weather"
|
| "communications issues"
|
| Are you doing this on purpose? I'm not even a fan of the
| guy but this type of out-of-context taking just hurts
| discourse. It's the type of thing I came to HN to avoid.
| walthamstow wrote:
| I notice you don't correct anything I've said, because
| none of it is false.
|
| He did blame CrowdStrike, right at the top of the list of
| blame. He did not take any responsibility for what he and
| his org did.
| al_borland wrote:
| > "I Spent 50 Hours In Ketchup"
|
| Mr Beast throwing out viral video ideas sounds like the Family
| Guy joke generator from South Park[0].
|
| Doing a quick web search, it seems several people have made idea
| generators based off his formula.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTC9j0QpCBM
| rootsudo wrote:
| 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.
| hypeatei wrote:
| So basically:
|
| Come up with contrived BS that caters to younger audiences,
| micromanage anyone who is holding you up, and attempt to game a
| blackbox algorithm on a site you don't pay for (YouTube)
|
| The whole modern social media / influencer sphere seems like a
| huge bubble that will pop eventually. Google has already started
| wiping inactive accounts[0] presumably because storage isn't
| truly infinite or cheap. I imagine YT will also take the same
| path eventually.
|
| 0: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/12418290?hl=en
| j_maffe wrote:
| 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.
| hypeatei wrote:
| 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.
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| 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.
| postalrat wrote:
| When people realize they can spent a fraction of what they
| pay for advertising and get the same results.
| j_maffe wrote:
| Do you have any proof of that?
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _contrived BS ... micromanage ... game a blackbox algorithm_
|
| The relatively higher production cost warrants hyper
| optimization (as an org) and demands high agency (of
| producers).
|
| > _younger audiences_
|
| Internet is so vast in that making something for the 0.1% is
| still an audience of millions.
| userbinator wrote:
| These influencers' accounts are certainly not inactive.
| hypeatei wrote:
| No, but the cracks are starting to show. My point is that YT
| may go down the same path and get stingy with video storage.
| j_maffe wrote:
| You're really overestimating the cost of video storage and
| streaming compared to the kind of revenue they're able to
| get.
| agos wrote:
| people who work in marketing/growth are already saying that
| influencer marketer rates have steeply declined. we can only
| hope!
| worldsayshi wrote:
| 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.
| worldsayshi wrote:
| 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.
| guerrilla wrote:
| This is a good point. See alcohol and tobacco. People are
| smoking less though, aren't they?
| cbanek wrote:
| 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.
| aswegs8 wrote:
| 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.
| splatzone wrote:
| This is absolutely the responsibility of the healthcare
| system tbh. It feels intrusive right now, but
| discouraging smoking would have felt intrusive once too.
| worldsayshi wrote:
| Yes, press the play button on the world map here:
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/which-countries-smoke-most
| tarsinge wrote:
| Yes, see the sugar industry. I find it quite similar how both
| use brain hacks. It makes behavior extremely hard to change
| once people are hooked.
| dylan604 wrote:
| 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
| worldsayshi wrote:
| Yes, and now I will argue against myself a bit but it's
| also important to remember that addiction is not
| inevitable. It can be fought on a population level over
| time. Just take a look at this graph. Press the play
| button on the world map:
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/which-countries-smoke-most
|
| I think social media lands somewhere between tobacco and
| sugar. We don't need tobacco. We need carbohydrates but
| not refined sugar. Social media can be useful sometimes,
| but is often a disservice. The feeling of usefulness
| probably makes it more addictive than smoking. At least
| for me.
| hnpolicestate wrote:
| 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.
| KPGv2 wrote:
| 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.
| morkalork wrote:
| 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?
| hnpolicestate wrote:
| Scavengers Reign was excellent.
| hnpolicestate wrote:
| Btw. It's also seeped into video games. Compare Star Wars
| Outlaws to Star Wars Galaxies or KOTOR. Scary.
| orwin wrote:
| 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.
| klondike_klive wrote:
| Wait Scavengers Reign was cancelled?
|
| That's depressingly typical :(
| MindSpunk wrote:
| 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.
| klondike_klive wrote:
| 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.
| hnpolicestate wrote:
| The population craves lazy and ignorant marvel nothingness.
| Don't get mad at me. Go talk to them.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| Try this fantastic movie:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nycksytL1A&t=1s
| BoingBoomTschak wrote:
| Using elitist as an "automatically win any debate" witch
| word never paints you in a good light, FYI.
| Unbefleckt wrote:
| I do get a sense of relief downloading a movie recommendation
| and being greeted by the Criterion logo.
| nolok wrote:
| 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.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| mass produced for a different audience, however
| nolok wrote:
| Which doesn't make any difference in the context of their
| discussion, it's still mass produced and sold in
| supermarkets and thus by definition not
| obscure/unique/for initiated only.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| I thought the implication was that audiences in the past
| had better taste
| CooCooCaCha wrote:
| 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.
| yunwal wrote:
| 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.
| CooCooCaCha wrote:
| If people can't tell that content is trash then they have
| trash taste, and people with trash taste will seek out
| trash.
|
| There is better content in the world and those who have
| the taste to seek it out generally will.
| throw16180339 wrote:
| It's particularly apparent if you look at the Kindle Top
| 100 - https://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Kindle-
| Store/zgbs/digita.... I'm most familiar with the romances,
| so that's what I'll be discussing. There's a lot more to
| the genre than these examples, but that's not what sells.
|
| * _Fourth Wing_ and _Iron Flame_ are poorly written fantasy
| romances that blew up on TikTok.
|
| * _Haunting Adeline_ and _Hunting Adeline_ are poorly
| written dark romances(https://www.reddit.com/r/RomanceBooks
| /comments/uu1age/what_d... they're also antisemitic QAnon
| fan fiction.
|
| * Three books with bare chested men on the covers. These
| indicate that there's lots of sex scenes; no one reads them
| for plot.
|
| * _Icebreaker_ is a poorly written hockey romance. The
| author is ignorant about college, hockey, and the US to say
| the least.
|
| * _Credence_ is a contemporary romance that 's best known
| for sex scenes and toxic relationships.
|
| * _A Court of Thorns and Roses_ and _A Court of Mist and
| Fury_. Both of these are mediocre fantasy romances by Sarah
| J. Maas; she 's the Dan Brown of romance.
| jongjong wrote:
| 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.
| mrkramer wrote:
| 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.
| agumonkey wrote:
| 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..
| joshdavham wrote:
| > "contrived BS", "mircromanage", "game a blackbox algorithm"
|
| Wow! There is a lot of bad faith in this comment. This is
| hacker news, not X, can you please be more thoughtful here?
| zulban wrote:
| 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.
| abeyer wrote:
| 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.
| np_tedious wrote:
| If you really think that, then you should be all the more
| interested in what it means to execute on that allegedly-
| harmful effort well vs poorly
| abeyer wrote:
| While there's merit to the "know your enemy" approach, I
| wouldn't expect everyone to take it.
| oulipo wrote:
| exactly
| zulban wrote:
| You seem to be arguing there's no use in learning about
| immoral businesses.
| __loam wrote:
| 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.
| tdeck wrote:
| 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.
| tshaddox wrote:
| 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.
| debacle wrote:
| His interviews are just another part of his business, and
| evidence shows that much of what he says during them is not
| factual.
| oulipo wrote:
| that's exactly the problem... why the fascination with
| "money" and "big"?
|
| The world has real problems... called environmental collapse
| and climate change. Why not working on those
|
| It's actually EASY to make money selling shit. It's HARD to
| solve a real problem to make everyone's lives better
| brookst wrote:
| 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.
| oulipo wrote:
| 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
| sixothree wrote:
| 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.
| oulipo wrote:
| "I spent 24h in Ketchup" is "refined taste" ?
| brookst wrote:
| 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.
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| 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.
| sverhagen wrote:
| "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.
| latexr wrote:
| > Mr. Beast is building the best YouTube videos. It is a
| quality product and it is entertainment.
|
| Hard disagree. Is he making the most profitable, most
| clicked, or most viral videos? Maybe. That's objectively
| quantifiable and I'll give you that. But "best" is very
| subjective. I wouldn't give a rat's ass if Mr Beast
| stopped making videos and deleted his account today. His
| videos are the audiovisual equivalent of junk food: not
| good for you; negatively addictive; and big shady
| business.
|
| Give me Folding Ideas any day. Now those are some quality
| and entertaining videos. The kind I save up to savour
| with some wine. That's my definition of best. Yours will
| differ, but that's the point.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/@FoldingIdeas
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| 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.
| latexr wrote:
| 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.
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| Not defensive. Just telling you my point of view, albeit
| passionately. I wish you a peaceful week too!
| slt2021 wrote:
| 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
| kiba wrote:
| 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.
| grumple wrote:
| 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?
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| 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.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| 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.
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| >And it's not examination of psychology.
|
| You put humans in extreme situations and you see how they
| react and you see what they do. It is an examination of
| psychology 100%. That's why people were interested in the
| original show because how humans behave in extreme
| situations is what a lot of people are interested in.
|
| >It's a drama written by YouTube influencers. It thrives
| on being "real" while having to do with reality as much
| as "reality tv". Which is to say, none at all.
|
| Possible. But then again you have no evidence to back
| that up that it's entirely fake. The leaked document
| doesn't mention anything about faking anything. You made
| this statement up out of thin air without presenting
| evidence.
|
| What's your evidence that Mr. Beasts videos don't have
| any psychology and are all fake?
| Ygg2 wrote:
| > You put humans in extreme situations and you see how
| they react and you see what they do
|
| That's not psychology. That's torture for dubious gains.
| By that stretch of imagination, you can construe any
| gulag or concentration camp as an examination of
| psychology.
|
| Psychology would require a double-blind experiment, some
| kind of control group, etc.
|
| > Possible. But then again you have no evidence to back
| that up that it's entirely fake.
|
| https://www.uniladtech.com/social-media/youtube/mrbeast-
| resp...
|
| He already faked videos before.
|
| Most of how reality TV works is by live editing to create
| narratives and guiding players along what the audience
| wants to see. It's lies by omission and exaggeration.
|
| > The leaked document doesn't mention anything about
| faking anything.
|
| Well, of course the official manual isn't going to spell
| it out, that's stuff that's admissible in court. But
| learn to read between the lines.
|
| No CEO is going to tell his employees, lie, cheat and
| steal to get our taxes to appear as low as possible, and
| our revenue as high as possible. They will say: "Be a go
| getter. Get those KPIs in the green. Only you can make a
| difference! Make me proud! Etc."
|
| That said, the leaked production document is alarming
| even by these standards. "NO DOES NOT MEAN NO" stands
| head and shoulders above the rest in its implication,
| even if it didn't sound like a rapist's mantra.
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| >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.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| > No. Examining all human behavior under all
| circumstances is psychology. EVEN torture.
|
| Psychology is a science. Or at least tries to be. What
| you describe is sadism.
|
| > Should've presented this first.
|
| You should have investigated Mr. Beast a bit better
| before coming into this discussion.
|
| > There is no reading between the lines. Present
| evidence.
|
| Have you ever worked in a corporate environment? Honest
| question. Because I did, and such behavior is standard
| practice. Never write anything that's incriminating, only
| discuss in private.
|
| Hell, just read about Google and how engineers were told
| to not use the M(arket) -word in any written
| communication.
|
| https://themarkup.org/google-the-giant/2020/08/07/google-
| doc...
|
| > Rapist? Whatever this guy is, he's not a rapist. Your
| language is way over the top.
|
| Step 1. Please read what I said. Step 2. Don't add words
| to my sentences.
|
| I said SOUNDS LIKE a rapist's mantra. "No means no" is
| the female anti-rape slogan. What do you get when you
| negate an anti-rape mantra? A rapist's mantra.
|
| -----
|
| That aside, the 'No doesn't mean No' part sounds
| absolutely Machiavellian for a guidebook for new
| employees.
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| >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.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| > It's a science and observing human behavior is within
| the lines of that science.
|
| That's not science. Science requires, hypothesis and
| testing, it also requires isolating confounding factors.
| Reality TVs and Mr. Beast videos aren't that.
|
| > I did, found no evidence, and yours is flimsy.
|
| Is it? Luckily, there is more, now go and look better.
|
| > Sounds like your a child molester and pedophile. See
| what I did there?
|
| Do you mean you're putting words in my mouth? I'm used to
| it.
|
| > Your comparison was completely uncalled for, "No
| doesn't mean No" doesn't need to be placed in the context
| of rape, of course he's saying that in the context of an
| aggressive hustle culture.
|
| Seeing the culture/people he surrounded himself with, I'm
| not sure if that's uncalled-for. But I'm awaiting further
| proof to make a definite statement.
|
| > He's promoting a hustle culture. I'm not too into that
| myself. But "Machiavellian" is, again, too over the top.
|
| 'Ends justify the means' is literally Machiavellian. That
| guidebook is full of it. Call it hustle, call it
| A-players, it's the same thing.
|
| ---
|
| To sum up, you don't know what science is, you don't seem
| to be able to read between the lines, came into this
| uninformed and have a nasty tendency to misread and put
| words I didn't write/commission into my mouth. I'm done
| here. This is debate with someone who's arguing in bad
| faith.
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| 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.
| slt2021 wrote:
| he is creating video for the _median_ YouTube user
| (similar how some politicians pander to a hypothetical
| _median voter_ )
| kiba wrote:
| It's junk for other users. MrBeast videos are merely
| mildly interesting to me and then it fall flat.
| CPLX wrote:
| > Obviously Mr. Beast isn't as far out ethically as casinos
|
| That's not obvious
| cmcaleer wrote:
| Casinos are incredibly exploitative not only to staff
| (even relatively 'above board' companies like Evolution
| have awful labor records in poor Eastern European
| countries), but they thrive out of milking their
| customers in incredibly manipulative, tactical ways to
| bleed them as slowly and effectively as possible.
|
| Tactics such as returning offers are specifically made to
| encourage people to pick up gambling addictions.
| Regulations are skirted by companies like Stake, allowing
| customers to skirt restrictions easily with a VPN and lax
| KYC. Their massive presence in sports as sponsors help
| them advertise to not just adults but children who engage
| with sports as well, a fact that I'm sure these operators
| love.
|
| While Mr Beast might use tactics that could be construed
| as similar, or tries to hit KPI which are similar to
| those used by casinos, I'm quite sure that Mr Beast video
| addictions do not lead to thousands of suicides a year,
| and that fact alone leads me to think that it is in fact
| obvious that Mr Beast is not as far out ethically as
| casinos.
|
| Get real.
| worstspotgain wrote:
| A casino is the scummiest business this side of drug
| cartels and real estate. Edgy reality TV is more in the
| ballpark.
| hypeatei wrote:
| 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)
| qwertytyyuu wrote:
| Pretty sure he regards c players as ones that only "carry
| their weight" but nothing more
| CooCooCaCha wrote:
| 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.
| nialv7 wrote:
| I don't like how much people tie success to the amount of
| money someone earns. (or how many views someone gets on
| YouTube, for that matter)
|
| There are many people who I consider successful that have
| never earned 700 mil, and there are people who made billions
| I don't give a fuck about.
| wfme wrote:
| 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.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| 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.
| j45 wrote:
| When the brand is strong and outgrows a platform..
|
| The brand could start their own complementary platform too.
|
| Not much different than the content becoming its own media
| network.
| slt2021 wrote:
| 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"
| mattmaroon wrote:
| I don't even think he's gaming an algorithm. He doesn't have
| to.
|
| He's just making videos people will click on and then watch.
|
| It's almost like he's trying to make something people want.
| I've heard that before somewhere...
| simonw wrote:
| 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.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| 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.
| simonw wrote:
| 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.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| 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.
| gruez wrote:
| >If you read the full PDF it's clear he is very carefully
| gaming the algorithm: [...]
|
| How is this different than any other technique to
| maximize engagement/readership, eg. inverted pyramid
| format for newspaper articles? It's probably designed to
| draw people in and sell copies. Is that also "gaming the
| algorithm"?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalis
| m)
| simonw wrote:
| "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?
| gruez wrote:
| 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.
| simonw wrote:
| Did you read my summary and not the full PDF?
|
| If you've only read my summary then we are discussing
| this with completely different mental models of what he
| actually does.
| gruez wrote:
| 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".
| simonw wrote:
| Go and read pages 6 through 10 of the PDF:
| https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YaG9xpu-
| WQKBPUi8yQ4HaDYQLUS...
|
| They do not describe the same process everyone else uses
| to make content. They are much more specific than that.
| gruez wrote:
| So far as I can tell his "gaming the algorithm" is having
| a few short clips near the start to hook people in (ie.
| an summary/abstract), and periodic bursts of excitement
| to keep people engaged. The first is so banal that it's
| hardly worth discussing. Articles in scientific journals
| have abstracts/summaries. It's not anything nefarious.
| The rest seems like standard narrative/storytelling
| advice, eg. hero's journey[1], or how broadcast TV shows
| have cliffhangers/plot developments to get people to
| watch the next episode or ad break. Do you think 24[2] is
| "gaming the algorithm" by presenting 24 action packed
| episodes where there's always some new/unresolved plot
| point at the end of each episode?
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero's_journey
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24_(TV_series)
| simonw wrote:
| What he's doing is very clever and very effective.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| 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.
| j45 wrote:
| Well said. It smells like some sour grapes in some of these
| comments.
|
| Making videos that click and spread is clearly a skill or
| everyone would do it.
| serjester wrote:
| Can you do better?
|
| If 100's of millions of people are watching something, then
| clearly it has entertainment value.
|
| His management philosophy might rub people the wrong way but
| it's hard to dispute it's effectiveness. Nor do you have to
| work there.
|
| His success is all the more impressive given he started with
| nothing and how competitive the space is.
|
| On some level he's the personification of the youtube algorithm
| - don't blame him, he's just giving people what they want. On
| some level this feels like the same outcry parents had to video
| games in the 90's.
| mattnewton wrote:
| 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.
| CaptainFever wrote:
| > 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.
| doe_eyes wrote:
| > 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.
| bgun wrote:
| 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.
| refulgentis wrote:
| 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...
| nicomeemes wrote:
| Well, at the very least Black Mirror will have plenty of
| ideas for next season.
| wussboy wrote:
| I'm not sure it's still "Black". I think it might just be
| "Mirror".
| sixothree wrote:
| Wow. Your feed is pretty messed up. Here is my youtube
| shorts feed:
|
| - how programmers _actually_ review code
|
| - 3D Printed Latch Mechanism
|
| - I Always Thought This Border Was Straight (about a border
| in australia)
|
| - You need to go to a "better" place! (rescue of an injured
| raptor)
|
| I think YouTube is a lot like twitter (5 years ago), in
| that what you view and follow affects what you're fed.
| taberiand wrote:
| 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.
| refulgentis wrote:
| 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.
| bear141 wrote:
| I am intrigued by this Cops Daughter video. Do you have a
| link?
| refulgentis wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5gdXvfve8A
|
| not exact match, if i see the bac one again i'll share
| it.
|
| but this is somewhat typical of the drama, only missing
| element is a generic slop voiceover that interjects every
| 2 minutes with two sentences: 1. vague statement about
| what's happened so far that could apply to any video. 2.
| "...but they weren't prepared for what happened next!"
| (nothing crazy ever happens) (except on the 'cop gets
| arrested for DUI' ones where they think they're gonna get
| a favor like its 1994 still)
|
| EDIT: this ones a good subtle example of the adult baby
| video https://www.youtube.com/shorts/jan_KjEZd20
| someothherguyy wrote:
| 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.
| someothherguyy wrote:
| > I think YouTube is a lot like twitter (5 years ago), in
| that what you view and follow affects what you're fed.
|
| Clear your cookies, cache, local storage, stay logged
| out, and see what happens. The baseline is junk.
| taberiand wrote:
| 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.
| j45 wrote:
| Online Advertising, and childrens videos have been doing it
| for a lot longer.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| 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.
| qwertytyyuu wrote:
| Pretty sure TikTok's vans were politically motivated
| oulipo wrote:
| 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
| simonw wrote:
| What did I fall for here?
|
| I think this is a really interesting document, despite having
| very few lessons I would adopt for my own work (as I said at
| the bottom of the post).
|
| I would be thrilled to read documents providing a level of
| cultural and operational detail like this from ANY company.
|
| Another one I find really interesting is the 37signals
| handbook: https://basecamp.com/handbook
| collinmanderson wrote:
| Yes, MrBeast's doc definitely also had "Getting Real"
| vibes. https://basecamp.com/gettingreal
| oulipo wrote:
| 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?
| brap wrote:
| Google wipes inactive accounts because they're often used for
| spam and malware.
| TMWNN wrote:
| >on a site you don't pay for (YouTube)
|
| But MrBeast does pay. He pays for it with every video, because
| YouTube keeps 45% of the ad revenue for it. If he receives
| ~$300,000 for a video, YouTube has kept another ~$300,000.
| tobyhinloopen wrote:
| Social media / influencer sphere a bubble that's going to pop?
| I... highly doubt that.
| renewiltord wrote:
| 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._
| sirspacey wrote:
| Yeah this hit hard for me as well.
|
| I've studiously avoided building on platforms, but very
| different mindset to decided to be the best player on that
| platform.
|
| Lesson learned: don't make it about something else. Win the
| algo.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| Fine Arts would like a word with you
| kelnos wrote:
| 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.
| codexon wrote:
| Building on someone's platform is a gamble.
|
| It paid off for Mr. Beast.
|
| Maybe it will pay off for you, or maybe you will get banned
| before you make enough to retire or create another company.
| This is prime example of survivorship bias.
| tpmoney wrote:
| 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.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| >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.
| whizzter wrote:
| 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.
| echelon wrote:
| 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.
| throw10920 wrote:
| Is this supposed to be a gotcha of some kind? I don't see any
| point or value in this comment.
| csallen wrote:
| 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.
| arder wrote:
| 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.
| yeukhon wrote:
| 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
| billy99k wrote:
| "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.
| jack_riminton wrote:
| I was fully expecting to read a load of nonsense, but it chimes
| quite a lot with military training, which shouldn't actually be
| that surprising.
|
| e.g. if someone is your bottleneck make them aware, give them a
| due date, check in regularly, in person comms is better than
| written etc.
| smsm42 wrote:
| > "I Spent 50 Hours In Ketchup"
|
| > In general the more extreme the better.
|
| I may be sounding like "get off my lawn" guy right now but should
| there be some realization that these people are a cultural
| analogue of if not heroin than at least cigarettes? They are
| making a good living from making things objectively worse in a
| society by tickling the base instincts of the addicts. I am not
| calling for government intervention or any of such BS but is it
| too much for me to expect at least some cultural pushback here?
| smcl wrote:
| 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.
| smsm42 wrote:
| 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.
| dymax78 wrote:
| Having been a young kid in the 80s, what I recently
| discovered was the primary concern with parents at the time
| (because, I genuinely don't remember) was using those
| afternoon and Saturday morning cartoons as a vehicle to
| sell products to kids - a barrage of advertisements. Seems
| pale in comparison to extreme behavior that potentially
| endangers others, e.g. deliberately crashing your airplane
| for views/hits.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| 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.
| aniviacat wrote:
| And such is the age old tale of old people forgetting what
| they were like when they were children.
|
| The younger generation always has been, and always will be,
| totally so much worse than the older generation.
| jrflowers wrote:
| > 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
| bigger_cheese wrote:
| 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.
| sensanaty wrote:
| 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 :)
| tqi wrote:
| I think it's worth reflecting on why you feel that way. I don't
| see how other people are spending their time is something I
| need to push back on...
| juunpp wrote:
| > 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.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| Yes, but there's a difference between drugs and this. The
| lack of evidence that they are the same or even similar for
| example.
| wingworks wrote:
| 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.
| smsm42 wrote:
| > Why is this BS?
|
| Because the cure would be way worse than the disease. Both
| parties don't have my best interest in mind, but only one
| party has the power to ruin my life. I am not inclined to add
| to that power any more that it is absolutely necessary. And
| we're so far beyond that point that any addition at this
| point is extremely suspect.
| jrflowers wrote:
| 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
| llamaimperative wrote:
| 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).
| smsm42 wrote:
| 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.
| Aidevah wrote:
| > _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.
| jrflowers wrote:
| > 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"
| jwells89 wrote:
| 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?
| maximus-decimus wrote:
| 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.
| jrflowers wrote:
| Watching Gallagher's Sledge-O-Matic and mourning the once
| brilliant minds of humanity
|
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=Nxls1KnKCA4
| barrell wrote:
| 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
| jrflowers wrote:
| > 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?
| barrell wrote:
| Since this clearly isn't a good faith argument, I will
| concede you are right. The fact there are any problems
| prevalent in society is demonstrative proof that not a
| single hour has ever been wasted on YouTube. I will
| subscribe now to MrBeast.
| jrflowers wrote:
| > Since this clearly isn't a good faith argument
|
| Was good faith lost when this question was asked
|
| > How much societal progress has been killed from the
| amount of time spent watching Mr beast videos?
|
| or when this question was asked
|
| > What in particular do you envision society could have
| accomplished without this man on youtube?
|
| Is it bad faith because I said I didn't know how to
| answer specifically, or is it bad faith because you
| decline to answer on principle?
| barrell wrote:
| Here is Claude's response:
|
| Jrflowers' response exhibits a few cognitive biases and
| logical fallacies:
|
| False dichotomy / black-and-white thinking: By suggesting
| that either all societal progress has been killed or none
| has, jrflowers presents an oversimplified view that
| ignores the nuanced reality.
|
| Reductio ad absurdum: Taking the original question to an
| extreme conclusion ("all societal progress has possibly
| been killed") to make it seem ridiculous.
|
| Straw man argument: Misrepresenting the original point to
| make it easier to attack. The original question asked
| about the potential impact, not claiming that all
| progress had been halted.
|
| Sarcasm and dismissiveness: Rather than engaging with the
| question seriously, jrflowers responds with sarcasm,
| which doesn't contribute to a productive discussion.
| jrflowers wrote:
| What did Claude say when you asked it to imagine what
| societal progress we could've had if the ketchup video
| hadn't been made?
| tinco wrote:
| 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.
| barrell wrote:
| 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
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| Is it shallow entertainment? Sure.
|
| But sometimes you want to eat a soggy kebap and not a Michelin-
| star gourmet meal, and that's fine too (and I can't stand
| people who malign what other people enjoy because it's "not
| pure enough").
| smsm42 wrote:
| 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.
| paulcole wrote:
| Do you think you should go to a Michelin starred restaurant
| every night?
| pawelmurias wrote:
| Been only to one but it had decent food that you could
| eat ever day.
| Uhhrrr wrote:
| 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...
| smsm42 wrote:
| 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.
| throw10920 wrote:
| I don't know what subculture you're living in, but in several
| of mine there absolutely is pushback against this, with people
| avoiding consuming this kind of content and trying to prevent
| their children from consuming it, too.
|
| Now, the question why the _larger_ US (or English-speaking)
| culture isn 't uniformly doing the same is much more
| interesting, but there's no known reason for this and most of
| the common explanations are both somewhat political, and not
| backed up by much evidence, so discussion often degenerates to
| talking about why your theory is more plausible.
|
| I wish we knew.
| userbinator wrote:
| 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.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| 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.
| throw10920 wrote:
| 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.
| winternewt wrote:
| 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.
| kredd wrote:
| 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.
| moomoo11 wrote:
| 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.
| tpmoney wrote:
| 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.
| culebron21 wrote:
| 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.)
| helloplanets wrote:
| Wasn't Fear Factor this exact same concept already, twenty
| years ago?
| kalleboo wrote:
| And just reality TV in general. His "Girls vs Boys" stunt is
| just a budget version of Big Brother, Survivor, etc.
| j_timberlake wrote:
| 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
| FrozenSynapse wrote:
| 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
| xandrius wrote:
| To be fair, watching sports is absolutely also brainrot for
| people not enjoying it.
| grecy wrote:
| Watching sports is literally watching other people live
| their dream.... While you do not.
| yard2010 wrote:
| What do you mean unnecessary, I saved king Casimir twice,
| random people at the tavern are talking about it every single
| day.
| DaoVeles wrote:
| Maybe a little sprinkling of PT Barnum in there as well?
| yard2010 wrote:
| 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.
| wtk wrote:
| 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.
| podgorniy wrote:
| > 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).
| tmoertel wrote:
| From the referenced doc:
|
| > CTR is basically how many people see our thumbnail in their
| feeds divided by how many that click it.
|
| That's actually 1/CTR.
|
| Another example of math fluency not being required for success at
| the top.
| KPGv2 wrote:
| 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
| smsm42 wrote:
| 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.
| ajkjk wrote:
| ... Sounds like a person with plenty of fluency made a typo.
| mrkramer wrote:
| I respect his dedication and grind....I prefer more YouTube pop
| culture and YouTubers than TikTok and TikTokers. YouTube is so
| much better.
| j_maffe wrote:
| The grind to do what? Make an endless stream of shit content?
| Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma
| talldayo wrote:
| 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.
| mrkramer wrote:
| >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.
| talldayo wrote:
| 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.
| mrkramer wrote:
| >I cannot honestly say anything on YouTube comes close to
| the production in an episode of Top Gear or Game of
| Thrones.
|
| >Content on YouTube is terrible in new and terrifying
| ways.
|
| Most of the YouTube's content is amateur UGC(user
| generated content) and it works pretty well for what it
| is.
| refibrillator wrote:
| Direct link to the PDF: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YaG9xpu-
| WQKBPUi8yQ4HaDYQLUS...
| jesprenj wrote:
| Or the actual PDF file instead of Google docs:
| http://splet.4a.si/dir/How-To-Succeed-At-MrBeast-Production....
| jonathanyc wrote:
| > 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.
| baxtr wrote:
| Are we sure this got "leaked"? Or is this merely part of the not
| leaked production PDF?
|
| It will generate a ton of attention. Who cares if it's bad?
| simonw wrote:
| 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.
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| > 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
| latexr wrote:
| 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.
| mewse-hn wrote:
| It was leaked with a lot of attention being paid to the "no
| doesn't necessarily mean no" section in the context of abuse at
| the MrBeast org
| egorfine wrote:
| > Since we are on the topic of communication, written
| communication also does not constitute communication unless they
| confirm they read it.
|
| Excellent.
| jellicle wrote:
| 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.
| Zanni wrote:
| Surprising reference to The Goal [1], which Mr. Beast "used to
| make everyone read ..." and still recommends. The Goal is a
| business novel about optimizing manufacturing processes for
| throughput and responsiveness rather than "efficiency" and is
| filled with counter-intuitive insights. Presenting it as a novel
| means you get to see characters grapple with these insights and
| fail to commit before truly understanding them. Excellent stuff,
| along the lines of The Phoenix Project [2], with which I assume
| many here are already familiar.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goal_(novel) [2]
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17255186-the-phoenix-pro...
| llamaimperative wrote:
| 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.
| Zanni wrote:
| 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.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| Interesting -- I'll have to read The Goal! I've only read
| the reference material around ToC, so this sounds additive
| :)
| tpmoney wrote:
| >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.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| 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.
| tpmoney wrote:
| > 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.
| kookybakker wrote:
| 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.
| DaoVeles wrote:
| 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.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| > 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.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| Yeah it mostly only works for small boutique shops like
| the Toyota Production System or Ford's manufacturing
| line.
|
| And yes, a lot of manufacturing _doesn't_ behave this
| way. That's the "counter" part of "counter-intuitive"
| revealing itself.
|
| This comment is yet another of these excellent cases in
| point!
|
| You really don't see how "they're afraid to turn them off
| even for critical maintenance" might be actually
| suboptimal behavior in the long run?
| jiggawatts wrote:
| 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!
| citizenpaul wrote:
| 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.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| 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.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| 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.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| 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.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| 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).
| newaccount74 wrote:
| 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.
| krrrh wrote:
| This sounds intriguing. Of note for anyone with an audible
| membership: The Goal is in the free library.
| BryanLegend wrote:
| It's also included in Spotify Premium for free.
| potatoman22 wrote:
| Reading through the document, this company seems hellish for its
| employees. I wonder how the pay and perks are
| qwertytyyuu wrote:
| Spoken like a "c-player" haha. I'm with you though. It's only
| for people who really very much enjoy working on the things he
| does.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| Seems like your average creative industry company, to be
| honest.
|
| Underpaid, overworked, expectations of "total dedication", for
| the off-chance that you can rise to the top or branching out.
| joshdavham wrote:
| I really liked his distinction between A, B and C-team players.
| This could be a really good framework for recruiting in an
| ambitious startup.
| RandomThoughts3 wrote:
| 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.
| guywithahat wrote:
| I was thinking that too. It's something you don't hear much
| from YC but a lot of founders have similar corporate hiring
| policies.
| null0pointer wrote:
| I hope everyone here who is praising the A, B, C-player
| framework recognizes that it comes from Jack Welch's much
| criticized Vitality Curve system.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve#Ratings
| simonw wrote:
| 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.
| joshdavham wrote:
| 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
| simonw wrote:
| 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.
| rasengan wrote:
| Obligatory dogpack404 link [1]
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/@DogPack404
| kurisufag wrote:
| who is dogpack404, and why is posting their links obligatory?
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| 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.
| pockybum522 wrote:
| This reminds me of how every corporation I've ever seen operates.
| Why is this strange or interesting?
| simonw wrote:
| 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."
| wongarsu wrote:
| 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
| tpmoney wrote:
| 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"
| jjkaczor wrote:
| This guy "corporates"... today you win at "buzzword bingo"!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buzzword_bingo
| saylisteins wrote:
| The valve handbook is an interesting read as well, it's very
| different, but in a way very similar.
|
| Link: https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/apps/valve/Valve_New
| Emplo...
| GaggiX wrote:
| 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.
| asmor wrote:
| It's there, on page 19.
| simonw wrote:
| I think this document predates the current scandal - the page
| 19 reference is to
| https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/02/style/mrbeast-beast-
| games... where the more recent scandal is
| https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna164777
|
| (Sorry, my mistake: the page 19 bit is indeed "no does not
| mean no" which is unfortunate wording given a current
| scandal! The scandal I referred to is the one about leaving
| contestants in the sun for three+ hours)
| GaggiX wrote:
| I wonder why it wasn't mentioned in the article.
| ttepasse wrote:
| 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.
| throw10920 wrote:
| 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.
| db48x wrote:
| 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.
| ttepasse wrote:
| 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.
| db48x wrote:
| Yep, I do something similar as an alternative to
| subscribing to things on Youtube itself.
| ocean_moist wrote:
| 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.
| simonw wrote:
| 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.
| j45 wrote:
| First time entrepreneurs are also learning how to build
| culture. No excuse, but still.
| next_xibalba wrote:
| > 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.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| How does that align with Dan Luu's article "95th percentile
| isn't that good"[1] and the general observation so many of
| us have that the companies we work for and interact with
| and buy from are executing so badly on so many fronts?
|
| That is, most programmers aren't good programmers, most
| managers aren't good managers, most salaries aren't good
| salaries, most salespeople aren't good salespersons, most
| workflows aren't efficient, most team communications aren't
| effective.
|
| If Dan Luu is right, it shouldn't take extraordinary effort
| to do better (excepting the case where "trying" is
| extraordinary). If he's wrong why does it take Herculean
| effort to outdo a bunch of average companies?
|
| [1] https://danluu.com/p95-skill/
| johnny22 wrote:
| a small focused group of tryers is probably a big help
| cellis wrote:
| 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
| ozim wrote:
| I think what you are missing:
|
| - not everything is worth doing extraordinarily as no one
| will pay for excellence of some services or goods
|
| - being exceptionally good at something doesn't guarantee
| someone will buy from you, people might just don't like
| you or your branding
|
| - there are bunch of other market forces that you have to
| overcome and Dan seems like was writing about being 95%
| on a single thing
| next_xibalba wrote:
| 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 Andre Barroso, Urs Holzle,
| 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).
| safety1st wrote:
| 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.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| "you need to be insanely smart and work 80 hour weeks"
| ... to pass a bunch of MBAs managing 50-percentilers? How
| does that make sense?
| jodrellblank wrote:
| > " _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 Andre Barroso, Urs Holzle,
| Amit Singhal, etc._ "
|
| and it was up against Yahoo! one of the most famously
| directionless bumbling tech companies, and their peers.
| Yahoo! didn't seem like it was executing on almost all
| cylinders with almost LASER focus on some goal, so why
| did it take 99%ilers working full tilt _and_ an
| innovative idea (PageRank) _and_ an innovative model
| (off-shelf Intel /Linux clusters instead of 'real'
| expensive server class hardware like Sun and mainframes)
| _and_ Silicon Valley funding to beat them?
|
| If you're not at a FAANG or similar, your coworkers are
| average, maybe disinterested, the processes and
| procedures seem almost designed to slow and frustrate
| progress, managers don't know much about the job and hate
| making decisions or taking risk; shouldn't it be possible
| to outdo half the companies which exist, and most of the
| companies which fail, by doing just slightly better work
| than average?
|
| Where's that discrepancy coming from?
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| 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.
| razakel wrote:
| >If he's wrong why does it take Herculean effort to outdo
| a bunch of average companies?
|
| Inertia. It's very difficult to outrun someone who has a
| head start.
| greesil wrote:
| 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?
| j45 wrote:
| Learning why it's done the way it's done before bringing up
| the beginner questions they get answered over and over is
| reasonable.
| greesil wrote:
| 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.
| charlie0 wrote:
| 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.
| greesil wrote:
| 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.
| j45 wrote:
| They also don't know better.
|
| It's a lot of work to stay open minded, flexible, free,
| and not know better.
|
| Still, investing in their development can yield the kinds
| of people that an organization may be after.
| charlie0 wrote:
| 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.
| xxs wrote:
| >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.
| lmm wrote:
| 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.
| xxs wrote:
| 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.
| j45 wrote:
| 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.
| refurb wrote:
| An example of risk taking in operations is right there in
| the pdf - "no doesn't mean no"
|
| They give the example of picking a filming location you
| aren't likely to get permission to film in but would
| produce outstanding content.
| nrp wrote:
| 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).
| gleventhal wrote:
| It clearly biased for young people or those without a
| family with something to prove, the perfect type of
| employee to exploit and vampirize.
| thinkloop wrote:
| There's no exploitation, he wants them to get rich, he
| wants this to be their last career. He's asking who's
| interested in going on that journey.
| nothercastle wrote:
| How exactly do they get rich? No obvious mention of
| profit share or any other actual reward expect the growth
| of the beast media brand
| Viliam1234 wrote:
| 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.
| JCharante wrote:
| It's not about exploiting. Getting work done isn't
| inherently a bad thing.
| blindluck wrote:
| 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.
| nothercastle wrote:
| It's about everyone doing 60-80 hours of work a week
| though
| tobyhinloopen wrote:
| Some have a passion for their job. I know, it's
| unimaginable.
| gleventhal wrote:
| I love my job, but I don't do more than 8 hours
| generally, and am paid very fairly, and it's quite
| competitive, we aren't slackers.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I appreciate it for being honest tbh, 99% of job hunting in
| the IT field is filtering out the bullshit, or the
| greenwashing that what a company does is Good, Actually.
|
| Example, I work for an energy company. Their objective is
| to earn money. They earn money by selling gas and
| electricity to their customers. Their revenue increases if
| they have more customers, using more electricity/gas, and
| if the price goes up. If they were honest, they would be
| pushing their customers to use more energy; "Hot in summer?
| Get an AC! Cold in winter? Don't wear a sweater, crank up
| the thermostat! Have you considered a sauna and jaccuzi?
| Isn't a long hot bath nice?" that kind of thing.
|
| But all energy companies' marketing talk (both internal and
| external) is about reducing energy usage, their green
| energy efforts, tips to customers to reduce power use, apps
| and websites so they can monitor it, and currently, dynamic
| contracts so people can optimize their usage to when the
| price is lowest.
|
| It's just so cynical.
| GrinningFool wrote:
| On the surface, it looks like they're prioritizing what
| the customer (or market) wants - lower usage/expense -
| over company profits.
|
| What's the thing I'm missing that makes this cynical?
| nothercastle wrote:
| 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.
| tpmoney wrote:
| 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.
| naming_the_user wrote:
| Yeah, it reads as being pretty standard to me.
|
| To be honest I think there's just a bit of a bifurcation
| between people who do business, like really do business as
| a competition like an Olympic sport, and people who just
| sort of like turn up and do their thing for a bit and then
| go home.
|
| To the former camp all of this is intuitively obvious and
| doesn't need spelling out although the insights are
| generally useful.
| grogenaut wrote:
| Reading this post at the same time as a blind post where
| someone is asking what people do for the resto of the
| week once they finish their 2 hours of sprint work.
|
| The dichotomy sometimes
| blindluck wrote:
| The blind poster is obviously more savvy than the "A
| players".
| cezart wrote:
| Can you please share the other post you are referring to?
| bnralt wrote:
| 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.
| CaptainFever wrote:
| 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.
| nothercastle wrote:
| 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
| tpmoney wrote:
| > The company culture is extreme almost culty.
|
| Is it? I know one former employee who is currently in
| open conflict appears to think so, but they're also a
| single potentially biased source. Beyond that, has there
| been any specific information about the culture inside?
| This document hardly reads as "extreme almost culty" to
| me.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| 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.
| bnralt wrote:
| > 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.
| tpmoney wrote:
| > 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"
| safety1st wrote:
| 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.
| grecy wrote:
| > _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.
| FrozenSynapse wrote:
| > I think it's pretty clear he has figured out how to
| "master" YouTube better than anyone else ever has by a very
| wide margin.
|
| content for dumb kids
| fabianhjr wrote:
| > 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)
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| 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
| threeseed wrote:
| I always love the "just hire A-players" line.
|
| As though startups are trying to hire mediocre people instead
| of having no choice.
|
| And that 95% of startups don't know their metrics. Pretty sure
| almost all do but again don't have the skills or resources to
| meaningfully move them.
| kjksf wrote:
| It's more about willing to fire below-A players quickly
| rather than having a perfect hiring filter that only lets A
| players in.
|
| Looking back at 7 companies I worked at: they all had a tough
| hiring filter to get in. But most of them also had not that
| great people that they were not firing.
|
| Firing people is hard even when you know you should do it.
| You have to be a heartless bastard to not have a problem
| firing people.
|
| It's even worse when the company gets so big that a game of
| building empires starts in which case managers have an
| incentive to grow headcount to grow power, even if that
| headcount isn't very good.
|
| The document even talks about what MrBeast considers a
| B-player.
|
| Made a mistake once? That's fine. Fuck ups are a price of
| ambition.
|
| Made the same mistake twice? Need to be told the same thing
| multiple times? Not an A player so fired.
| XorNot wrote:
| Of course now you have a function which isn't non-optimally
| performed, it's now not being performed at all. Because
| you're probably "running lean" so actually you have no
| redundancy for that function.
|
| And then there's the sociological effect of course: are you
| even any good at identifying poor performers, does the team
| view it that way? You can be one employee departure away
| from an exodus since someone being laid off is usually a
| good sign for everyone else to reconsider how they feel
| about their position. Bad management is pretty good at
| generating a never-ending stream of "underperforming
| employees".
|
| Like let's state the obvious here: you're looking back the
| 7 prior companies you worked for. Are the people you
| thought should be fired still there? Are they still turning
| up every day and doing something? Because in that context,
| whatever their fault, they are a more reliable resource to
| the company then you were (this isn't judgment: my resume
| is long too).
| r00fus wrote:
| The major problem I see is: focusing on an individual, when
| it's the team that needs to be A-level. You can't just
| throw a bunch of A-players together and expect an A-team.
|
| Expecting your workers to never make the same mistake twice
| is extremely harsh and only works if you are comfortable
| with a lot of volatility in team structure & in an
| employer's market.
| DaoVeles wrote:
| It does come from a point of privileged. Steve jobs said "A
| players hire A+ players. A+ players hire A++ players". That
| was because he saw A players hiring B players. B Players will
| hire C players - and so on.
|
| That is all well and good when you are the golden goose that
| is Apple. Most people just do not get the opportunity to hire
| like that.
| j45 wrote:
| Apple wasn't that at the start. But it had a few a players.
| DaoVeles wrote:
| Absolutely. A part of that would have been Steve's
| legendary ability to convince folks to make the move to
| Apple even when they had options that looked better at
| the time. Another part was seeing the potential of those
| already in the company, another part was just dumb luck.
|
| I believe Job's was providing this perspective more in
| the late 2000's after he had been through the whole Apple
| exile/Next thing.
| j45 wrote:
| I wouldn't be one to speculate on steve
|
| Steve Jobs would be non existent in terms of ver getting
| off the ground without Steve Wozniak.
|
| Another visionary without the ability to execute and
| deliver.
|
| It's good they got together.
| ocean_moist wrote:
| >I always love the "just hire A-players" line. As though
| startups are trying to hire mediocre people instead of having
| no choice.
|
| If a startup can't attract talent (a sign of bad traction),
| that startup probably is not that good and more people won't
| solve the underlying problem. You would also be surprised how
| many startups outsource dev/marketing/etc. in their initial
| stages.
|
| If you can't convince smart people to work for you and that
| your idea is good, good luck trying to convince customers of
| the same.
|
| >And that 95% of startups don't know their metrics. Pretty
| sure almost all do but again don't have the skills or
| resources to meaningfully move them.
|
| I said most don't know them as well as Mr. Beast. Read
| "Chapter 1: What makes a Youtube video viral?". Most founders
| have not put the same amount of time into seeing how to
| track, measure, and impact metrics. He identified key KPIs
| and then experimented with changes until he found what
| worked. His whole north star to, minute by minute, structure
| each video, is informed by the KPIs. His whole strategy is
| built upon metrics by metrics.
|
| He clearly is obsessed with them to a degree few are. Some
| startups don't even know how much money they make, how much
| money they lose, etc.
| nfw2 wrote:
| I've seen multiple teams hire mediocre people despite having
| a choice. Usually it is because either:
|
| - they believe velocity is simply additive (A player + B
| player > A player)
|
| - they look too much into credentials (big name school /
| employer) and do not adequately vet ability
|
| - they start with the attitude "let's give this person a
| chance and see if they work out" and become too reluctant to
| fire when they turn out mediocre.
|
| Teams should be more comfortable staying small longer in my
| opinion.
| aa-jv wrote:
| >trying to hire mediocre people
|
| It should be "always retain A-players". You can hire as many
| ABC's as you like - some of those C's will become B's and
| A's, and some of the B's will become A's, and the rest .. you
| let go with severance.
|
| Thats the free market, baby. Live with it, or perish.
| deelowe wrote:
| Having recently switched jobs, I was again reminded of just
| how terrible most interviewers are. The more senior the
| interviewer, the more terrible.
| sage76 wrote:
| I am hearing this stuff from bigger companies too now. By
| definition, everyone cannot hire A players.
| nothercastle wrote:
| Yeah most places can't comp 2 Std deviation candidates.
| Either in pay or experience. Beast could because he's got
| the top company in the market that makes it cheap to hire
| talent.
| __turbobrew__ wrote:
| Startups usually have no choice, they cannot afford A
| players. There are businesses which do hire A-players such as
| OpenAI, Jane Street, Netflix, etc. but A players require A
| compensation.
| nothercastle wrote:
| And a lot of A players are unique snowflakes so they have
| to be compatible with other unique snowflakes so it can be
| hard to fill the gaps. You need a few Bs who are moldable
| to fill gaps
| OJFord wrote:
| > As though startups are trying to hire mediocre people
| instead of having no choice.
|
| Well one choice you might make is to hire some number of
| 'mediocre people' instead of one 'A-player'; the ratio of
| more junior to more senior; etc.
| latexr wrote:
| > Lot of people critiquing this, but you can't deny the
| success.
|
| You could say that about literally any shady business. Imagine
| seeing a PDF proving tobacco leaders knew for decades that it
| caused cancer and saying what you did.
|
| Being monetarily successful does not mean you're good or
| shouldn't be criticised.
| ahmedfromtunis wrote:
| I'd love to see that document and I'm sure there's a lot to
| learn from it and a lot of knowledge to use for the good of
| humanity.
|
| The fact that a shady business used some tactics to advance
| its cause doesn't automatically condemns the means.
| MeetingsBrowser wrote:
| Most shady businesses can be boiled down to, "we exploit
| people for personal gain".
|
| Which is always bad.
| tourmalinetaco wrote:
| Apple: exploits factory workers to fulfill the customer's
| desire for status symbols.
|
| McDonalds: exploits hunger by conditioning you to desire
| convenient, unhealthy, and ultimately unsatisfying food.
|
| TikTok: exploits your dopamine to condition you to watch
| content, keeping you entertained with new quick doses
| constantly.
|
| You can pick almost any major company and find some way
| they exploit someone else.
| MeetingsBrowser wrote:
| > You can pick almost any major company and find some way
| they exploit someone else.
|
| Correction, you can pick any extremely large corporation.
|
| Very large (i.e. successful) exploit people by design.
| Businesses not willing to exploit people are at a
| disadvantage and can never be as successful as those that
| are willing to exploit others.
| tsunamifury wrote:
| You are being down voted but many years on this earth
| building trillion dollar companies has taught me you are
| right in a way no one wants to hear
| tourmalinetaco wrote:
| The richest business in history was the Dutch East India
| Company. The richest below them are the Mississippi
| Company, rounding it out with the South Sea Company.
| Within the top 10 includes oil companies, who exploit our
| future for profit, and Big Tech, who exploit us for
| profit. Is it any surprise most of the richest companies
| in history exploited human capital for massive gains?
| RobotToaster wrote:
| Pretty sure a dude called Karl wrote a book about this.
| ben_w wrote:
| "Exploit" (mostly) only has a negative connotation in the
| context of people; if you exploit a resource or an
| opportunity, it seldom gets seen the same way.
|
| Because of the latter, businesses leaders can also quite
| often talk about the former without even noticing that
| normal people regard "exploiting people" as a bad thing.
|
| Sometimes it's hard to even agree what counts as
| exploitation of a person: The profit margin of every
| successful employer I've ever had is, in some sense, them
| exploiting me -- but I've also worked in places where
| that's negative, loss-making, and the investors paid for
| my time with the profits made from others, which feels to
| me like the successes I've been involved with paying for
| the failures, not exploitation.
| hnbad wrote:
| Exploitation and profit are the same concept just
| different framing. The distinction between shady and non
| is usually more about who is being exploited, to what
| extent they're being exploited and how transparent the
| business is about that exploitation.
| vincnetas wrote:
| You could also like to read some documents from Karl
| Bischoff (the architect of Auschwitz)
|
| https://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/through-the-
| lens...
|
| And also Vrba-Wetzler report
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vrba-Wetzler_report
|
| I don't want someone to think that i'm blaming someone for
| reading stuff. I just think and see that sometimes for
| people it is very easy to forget or miss bad things (harm
| to society) when their salary (or income) depends on
| ignoring this.
| ocean_moist wrote:
| >Imagine seeing a PDF proving tobacco leaders knew for
| decades that it caused cancer and saying what you did.
|
| The difference is the game he's playing (youtube) is similar
| to the game we're playing (startups) so the success is
| tantamount.
|
| The game tobacco companies play is also very different, so
| the tobacco companies success will teach you very little
| about being successful in startups.
| barrell wrote:
| Personally the game I'm playing (building an effective
| edtech company) is probably less similar to the game he is
| playing (running illegal lotteries targeted at children)
| than the game Tabacco companies play (lean heavily on
| branding, marketing, and trying to control the academic
| narrative).
| wrsh07 wrote:
| Ignoring the ethics of Mr Beast, he is producing real videos
| at an incredibly high volume and they consistently do
| numbers.
|
| None of those videos is easy to make.
|
| Sure, it's maybe not great to be so impressed by logistics or
| supply chain of a tobacco company, but from a business and
| systems view some of it is interesting
| lxgr wrote:
| > Ignoring the ethics [...]
|
| I think that's very straightforwardly the point of
| contention here. Some people are doing that and are
| discussing the business aspects; others aren't.
|
| I don't think any particular discussion is more appropriate
| than the other, as long as people are in agreement on which
| one they're having.
| barrell wrote:
| I don't know if they're necessarily two different
| conversations - there's a conversation to be had whether
| the business practices discussed would have been
| effective in an ethical operation.
|
| It's entirely possible the success has nothing to do with
| the business principles and 100% the ethics. Same the
| other way around, or anywhere in between.
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| I would be genuinely curious to hear: in your mind, could
| any system be interesting to you, no matter its ethical
| basis? Or is there a line, and if so, what is the line to
| you?
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| Why I can't separate learning about a topic and finding
| the knowledge interesting vs. its value judgement against
| my worldview?
| teucris wrote:
| Agree and I'll take it a step further: shouldn't we
| encourage deep understanding of malicious or unethical
| systems so we can know how they work and possibly thwart
| them?
| chefandy wrote:
| A big folly in political movements is completely
| disregarding their opponents rhetoric. Studying it and
| discussing it is not the same as validating it. You can't
| effectively fight what you don't understand and you can't
| understand something you refuse to know.
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| I think you're misrepresenting my question.
|
| Mr Beast's "youtube success hacking", or whatever you
| want to call it, excels in the most obvious of ways: use
| hyperbole all of the time and use extreme and borderline
| misanthropic interpersonal interaction to achieve goals.
|
| I don't think either of these activities would surprise
| anyone at achieving success in _some_ form, despite how
| manipulative and sociopathic they are. What exactly is to
| be learned here? Where is the deep understanding?
|
| People click on things that are hyperbolic. When people
| are threatened with losing their jobs unless they perform
| at an extremely high level, they will work to the best of
| their ability to achieve that level, at the expense of
| practically everything else they value in their lives.
| None of this is new or novel.
|
| Most people avoid employing these structures because
| they're viciously misanthropic and cynical. Some, of
| course, do, but I don't see us using that information to
| ignore them or prevent them from existing. I just see
| them lauded for "thinking outside the box" on Hacker
| News.
| tpmoney wrote:
| What's interesting about this conversation is the
| different perspectives on the material, not necessarily
| the material itself. Nothing I read in the document reads
| like "use hyperbole all the time" or "extreme and
| borderline misanthropic interpersonal interaction".
| Instead most of it reads like the sort of things you'd
| expect to see in any high paced, high competition
| industry, just written for the sort of people that grew
| up in and would work at a YouTube company vs folks that
| grew up in and would work for a major manufacturer. Every
| company, whether explicitly said or not distinguishes
| between employees who are excited to be there and excited
| to be working on the company goals and the ones who are
| just there to punch a clock. And at every company the
| clock punchers have always been held in lower regard than
| the excited employees. We can worry about how that
| tendency can lead to worker exploitation (see also the
| game development industry), but the reality is any time
| you get a group of people together, the folks who have a
| vision and a mission are going to be more drawn to and
| get along better with the people who share a passion for
| that vision and mission.
| teucris wrote:
| Maybe the misalignment is one of misunderstanding - we
| don't make it explicit that sharing something like this
| isn't to celebrate it.
|
| I don't catch any major celebrations of abusive tactics
| on HN, but then again I tend to be late to the comments
| and those posts are buried by the time I arrive.
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| Let me ask that question a different way: let's say what
| you learn had no value or it was something that was
| already pretty well understood (such as the fact that
| people click misleading or hyperbolic links). What was
| the value to society in that information being created or
| shared?
| EE84M3i wrote:
| That is a completely different question.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| Man, this is overwrought. We're just talking about a
| YouTuber here for Christ's sakes. He makes silly videos
| of competitions with admittedly grueling conditions for
| entertainment, but people sign up for it voluntarily and
| they can leave at any time. This is not a serious ethical
| quandary.
| multjoy wrote:
| A YouTuber who is worth a considerable amount of money.
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| So you feel the person who is doing this competition
| doesn't feel like they actually need the money in their
| lives? Or do you think there might be a power imbalance
| around financial stability being exploited?
| wrsh07 wrote:
| The fact that I find the first chapter of When We Cease
| to Understand the World (the world war 1 bit) to be
| breathtaking/haunting maybe tells you everything you need
| to know
|
| (The book is historical fiction)
| sanderjd wrote:
| Ok, but the comment you're replying to wasn't ignoring the
| ethics. To me, this reads like, "ignoring the point of your
| comment, [other points]".
| Fmrbeast wrote:
| His shady way is clearly part of his business otherwise he
| would be successful without ripping of people.
|
| This is ridiculous analysing his performance while ignoring
| his ethics especially when it's part of his income if not a
| fundamental strategy
| calmbonsai wrote:
| You lost me at "ignoring the ethics".
|
| By de facto, you never ignore ethics. You may disregard
| them, but they're never ignored.
| hnbad wrote:
| Ignoring the ethics is literally antithetical to good
| engineering. Alas it seems to be the default for
| operating a business.
| chii wrote:
| because ethics have a cost. If you competitors don't need
| to obey the same ethics, they will out compete you.
| growse wrote:
| If you can't compete without throwing your ethics
| overboard, the right answer is to put it down and do
| something else, not _join in_.
| chii wrote:
| > put it down and do something else, not join in.
|
| by not joining the rat race, you fall behind. This makes
| you less capable of withstanding the pressure from other
| rat racers in the world.
|
| Imagine using this logic for survival in the jungle.
| Joeri wrote:
| The law of the jungle is perhaps not the best model for
| human society.
| freeopinion wrote:
| Ok. I'll bite. Ethics is one aspect of humans that
| allowed us to survive the jungle and move beyond it.
|
| I take your comment as a joke, but have come to the
| depressing conclusion that too many impressionable people
| will not understand it that way. They will think it some
| nugget of wisdom to revert to being a rat in a jungle.
| nothercastle wrote:
| Ethics are not morals. Ethics are business practices
| morals are religious and political views.
| ponector wrote:
| There is no ethics in business, only revenue and profits.
|
| Name any ethical company and I'm sure there will be
| questionable actions they did in past with "due to the
| market conditions" excuse.
| bambax wrote:
| There absolutely are ethics in business; ignore them at
| your peril (ask SBF).
| beejiu wrote:
| Ethics is not the same thing as legalities.
| ponector wrote:
| Sbf is just an example of people who failed. Contrary,
| Musk or Sackler family are good examples of people who
| succeeded. Do you want to talk about their questionable
| ethics and how it made them extremely rich?
| cryptonym wrote:
| Ethics is no binary. You ethics are not mine and
| everybody does questionable actions from time to time. A
| company is an entity with potentially thousands people,
| one of them doing questionable things will happen.
|
| Some legal entities are acting all the time in a way we
| would lock them up in psych ward if they were a natural
| person. That might be a good way to "succeed" but that's
| probably something the society shouldn't promote/foster.
|
| In the real world it's not only revenue and profits.
| That's for sure taking most of the space but people
| behind the entities are caring about other stuff and
| takes non-profit-optimal decisions all the time.
| Arisaka1 wrote:
| This is the line of reasoning phone scammers used
| whenever kitboga (a scam baiter) revealed his identity
| and asked them why they did this job instead of something
| better. One of them asked him "oh, so you are a saint,
| and you never did anything wrong?"
|
| It's absurd to attempt to equate two actions completely
| out of their context to claim that "everyone is unethical
| sometimes ".
| earnesti wrote:
| > There is no ethics in business, only revenue and
| profits.
|
| Ethics affect everything we do. If you are doing
| something deeply unethical, you have way more difficult
| time finding good employees, for example. Because people
| don't want to work for scumbags. And the people you find,
| are likely also unethical and care only about money, how
| do you think that is going to play out in the long run?
|
| Business and ethics are inseparable. You have to
| understand ethics to be able to make money - not meaning
| that you need to be ethical.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| Games Workshop, multi-billion pound publicly traded
| British company. Manufacture their core goods in British
| factories, don't engage in tax shenanigans.
| LunaSea wrote:
| They do however change their figurine bases from square
| to round in an effort to deprecate people's armies in a
| bid to generate revenue.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| Heh
| jjkaczor wrote:
| ... Myself... I find their 3-year lifecycle for rulebooks
| a little aggressive... (as well as their pricing - but
| hey, it's a hobby)
| iamacyborg wrote:
| Having to spend ~PS120 (rulebook and codex) every 3 years
| for a hobby is probably okay though?
| nothercastle wrote:
| It's probably a risk reward choice not a moral choice.
| coliveira wrote:
| I guess people are taking this comment as supporting
| unethical business, but in fact what he's saying applies
| to capitalism in general, and why capitalism is
| unethical. Pretty much every big company did and is doing
| unethical things, but for most people it doesn't matter
| because they're "successful". If you equate amounts of
| money with success, as our system does, then it is pretty
| much guaranteed that people will do unethical things to
| reach "success", i.e., X amounts of dollars.
| s_dev wrote:
| Wikimedia Foundation.
| wrsh07 wrote:
| I'm surprised you've never had a hypothetical
| conversation
| nothercastle wrote:
| Ethics only exist to provide value. If you can't point to
| a value that your ethics provide then it's not needed and
| excessive. Most of the ethical standards do provide value
| or mitigate risk you just need to understand what that
| risk and value trades is.
| atoav wrote:
| "Ignoring the ethics of Mr Beast" -- in a discussion on the
| ethics of Mr Beast.
|
| Sure I get it, probably there are lessons in there
| ethically good actors could look at and use -- but if you
| find yourself casting away the ethical doubts too easily,
| you might be in a dangerous spot to begin acting unethical
| yourself. It is totally possible to learn about the whole
| system with a morbid fascination while being constantly
| aware of the ethical implications without casting them
| aside.
|
| The real question for such an ethics-free look at a
| business is whether the unethical bits of a business can be
| really disentangled from the interesting bits in a
| meaningful way. That is very often not the case.
| wrsh07 wrote:
| I found the top level comment to highlight useful ideas.
|
| Operationally, so many people would benefit from
| understanding bottlenecks, critical components, etc
|
| It feels a little silly to say "a more ethical
| organization doesn't deal with such things"
|
| If we're here to discuss the links, then it's a little
| frustrating to have a hundred responses by people who
| haven't read the doc or are unable to set aside their
| preconceptions about someone saying things that feel
| fairly off topic to the top level comment
|
| > but if you find yourself casting away the ethical
| doubts too easily, you might be in a dangerous spot to
| begin acting unethical yourself
|
| Oh please. If I start a company and link this doc? Sure,
| then raise some concerns. If I am reading it and finding
| interesting operational advice about getting things done
| or inter team communication, I'm not particularly worried
| about becoming antisocial or accidentally behaving
| immorally (perhaps amorally is more apt)
| Ygg2 wrote:
| Ignoring the ethics of Mexican drug cartels, they are
| producing some crucial and consistently demanded products.
| Like high-volume of drugs and violence that rivals the
| state.
|
| None of those are easy to achieve.
|
| Sure, it's maybe not great to be impressed by the logistics
| of a militarized drug cartel, but from a business and
| systems view it's quite interesting. /sarcasm
|
| This is literally cocaine logic, i.e. because I feel good
| when taking cocaine, it's good for me. Ergo, cocaine is
| good.
| achenet wrote:
| what if you study Mexican drug cartels, and you find that
| they have a certain method of communication that enables
| them to communicate more efficiently.
|
| You copy this communication in your non-profit
| organization that feeds starving children and find that
| you are able to feed 50% more children when communicating
| with this more efficient method.
|
| This is not "literally cocaine logic", it's learning from
| others.
|
| To use an example you'll probably agree with more: You
| can hate the lyrics of a given musical artist but copy
| their production style and in doing so give your lyrics a
| better platform from which to be heard.
|
| Methods != end goals
|
| You can adapt effective methods currently used to
| accomplish questionable things to accomplish more noble
| things.
|
| although, to be perfectly honest, I doubt you'd learn
| much from Mexican drug cartels that would apply to
| software, as the markets are completely different.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| > Methods != end goals
|
| Ok, but the methods (hustle, grind-culture, high pressure
| on marks) are here just as questionable as the end goals
| (Be the biggest Youtuber).
|
| What can you learn from Mr. Beast? Nothing that a lack of
| conscience and some basic psychology of engagement
| couldn't teach you.
|
| To reuse your analogy, what if you could communicate
| information by arranging the corpses of your enemies in a
| certain pattern, then use international news reports to
| get the messages across.
|
| What could this teach us about communication? Nothing.
| nothercastle wrote:
| We learn that they operate on a culture of radical
| accountability. They are also a pressure cooker
| organization that micro manages hard and expects
| employees to pull all nighters
| nothercastle wrote:
| There are probably business ethics in the cartels as
| well. They have different core values and risk profiles
| than conventional businesses but there are likely
| business operating guidelines and operational ground
| rules that we can ethics.
| torginus wrote:
| Honestly to this day, I don't know what he did wrong, it
| seems like a concerted effort to take him down and/or
| grifters want to profit from his downfall by 'exposing'
| him.
|
| The allegiations seems to have been:
|
| - His shows are scripted to varying degrees - I think this
| should be obvious to anyone old enough to not think santa's
| real.
|
| - Some of his friends/production staff did some bad stuff
| (I won't elaborate). These people are not MrBeast, but
| sovereign individuals. Production staff in the movie
| industry rotates at a weekly rate.
|
| - His productions are a shitshow, with tons of stress
| overtime, last minute heroic saves etc. - If you've
| read/watched anything Adam Savage has written, you'll
| realise unfortunately the entire film industry is like
| this, with everything being on a tight timeline. Practical
| sets often can be set up once and get destroyed during
| filming. If somebody messes up, it's often weeks of work
| and millions of dollars down the drain.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| I think, potentially more problematic than all of that,
| are the allegations about illegal lotteries, etc.
| jjkaczor wrote:
| >- His shows are scripted to varying degrees - I think
| this should be obvious to >anyone old enough to not think
| santa's real.
|
| Anyone who watches 99% of media should not find scripting
| to be a surprise. And many posting here on HN, who have
| given technical talks and presentations definitely do
| some level of preparation/script in advance. You can tell
| which people on YouTube/TikTok/etc actually prepare and
| have a script - against those who just ramble on with
| absolutely no plan outside of "this is a cool thing I
| like, that I want to talk about for far too long". (I
| watch alot of DIY/maker style videos)
|
| Because - even if it is "unscripted" - there are soooo
| many hours of footage required to cut together even a
| short news interview segment. Many many years ago, I was
| interviewed for a short (5m) segment on "wardriving". The
| camera crew and interviewer took more than 8 hours to get
| all of their footage/angles and my various sound-bites
| for 5 minutes of aired footage. (And who knows how long
| in the edit room) It was eye-opening for me.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| Plus:
|
| - Exploiting his employees to a degree that could be
| considered torture (Yes, we need to keep you awake in
| solitary confinement for the time-lapse video)
|
| - Hiring Delaware a known Sex Offender, and not keeping
| him away from children.
|
| > I think this should be obvious to anyone old enough to
| not think santa's real.
|
| Some people assumed the story is real, and knowing it is
| fake lessens the impact of his contests and story arcs in
| his videos (Mac's trials hit different when you realize
| it's scripted).
| ljm wrote:
| I think the ethics are important when you're looking not
| just at Mr Beast's businesses themselves but also their
| internal culture, especially when squaring it up against
| the perception of himself he's created as some sort of
| squeaky clean philanthropic billionaire, particularly among
| his primarily young fans. Those big charity videos aren't
| done altruistically, they serve another purpose of
| deflecting criticism.
|
| You have the facade presented to the public, then the
| operations of the businesses he runs, then the culture
| built within them. If you ignore the ethics then you won't
| see that a significant part of his success is in his PR
| muscle, and how (young) people then expect that follows
| through to working for him or going on his show.
|
| I don't doubt that this isn't unlike the dream of going to
| work in the games industry as a kid, getting to make the
| very kind of game you loved to play, only to realise that
| what's on the inside is actually pretty ugly, and perhaps
| your fanaticism has been exploited.
| oulipo wrote:
| You're conflating "efficiency" with "success"
|
| Just say he's "efficient" at what he does (descriptive) but
| not "successful" (value judgment)
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| What's shady about producing entertaining videos that people
| want to watch?
|
| Are Marvel films shady for being popular? Is HN shady for
| adding features which increase engagement?
| vintermann wrote:
| Heck yes, Marvel films, any big Hollywood films, are shady.
| HN is basically a vanity project so it's less shady. If HN
| was "optimized for engagement" the way a MrBeast video or
| Marvel film is, I bet I'm not the only one who would be out
| of here.
| briandear wrote:
| HN puts the most popular submissions on top. Allows
| commenting and reviews, greys out low voted content.
|
| You don't think this is optimized for for engagement?
| Don't let the beige design fool you.
| ralfd wrote:
| hn is not optimized (thank good) and didn't change in
| forever. There is also no monetizing, it doesn't have ads
| nor subscription, and if it were more popular it would be
| more expensive to host.
|
| Instead look at reddit is desperately trying (inline ads,
| chat, avatars, forcing app use)
| icemelt8 wrote:
| not everyone likes to run a charity, some have a family
| to feed
| high_na_euv wrote:
| HN has ads.
| itishappy wrote:
| > There is also no monetizing, it doesn't have ads nor
| subscription...
|
| This is false. HN is hosted by YC, and as such promotes
| YC ventures. On the front page right now is the following
| link (with disallowed comments and upvotes):
|
| https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/continue/jobs/smcxR
| nM-...
| komali2 wrote:
| HN engagement is really low compared to platforms like
| reddit
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| Why is Marvel shady? Because they produce and market
| films that a lot of people enjoy?
|
| I mean personally I mostly enjoyed Marvel until they
| started multiverse crap. And they made way too many TV
| shows that were all terrible. So I stopped watching.
|
| Seems pretty low on the sketch scale to me.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| Marvel can produce so much stuff because they overwork
| and underpay employees like VFX artists and writers. Then
| those movies/shows don't do so well, so they lower the
| budget of the next one, and it devolves into what it is
| now.
| vintermann wrote:
| I'm not into the Marvel universe (obviously) but it
| seemed to me they had been doing multiversey stuff for a
| long time, so I looked it up. They've done it since the
| 60s. They have also done endless reboots and endless
| retcons.
|
| In short, they've milked every bit of nostalgia you may
| have for their characters, I mean their _properties_ , as
| long as humanly possible and then some.
|
| I don't even have any nostalgia for these characters.
| They were a really fringe phenomenon in my country. But
| do you think that means we don't get the 20+ Marvel
| movies shoved down our throats? Oooh, no. We'll eat what
| we're served, or not go to the movies at all (that's the
| option I choose). If you wanted to make a parody of
| hamfisted, audience-contemptous cultural imperialism, you
| couldn't do better than Marvelwood.
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| > been doing multiversey stuff for a long time
|
| Yes, everything in the movies/TV is derived from comic
| book. Comic books are _extremely_ niche so movie content
| is new and novel to most movie viewers.
|
| Multiverse / reboots / retcons also helped kill comic
| book popularity. It was a bad idea there as well!
| https://youtu.be/0PlwDbSYicM?si=iOlB2xYP8Cm1PwXc
|
| > they've milked every bit of nostalgia you may have for
| their characters
|
| No, it's not nostalgia. Marvel Film's greatest
| achievement is they took C and D tier characters and made
| them A tier. Iron Man was not super popular prior to the
| films. No one had even heard of Guardians of the Galaxy.
| Prior to the Marvel Cinematic Universe the most popular
| Marvel characters were Spider-Man and X-men. The film
| rights of whom had been previously sold to Sony and Fox.
|
| In any case, I don't see how any of this makes them
| "shady". Not entertaining? Maybe. Shady? I honestly don't
| even know what that means in this context. Superhero
| movies strike me as _extremely_ low on the scale of evil.
| Making mass market entertainment? Oh no the horror! /s
| bulbosaur123 wrote:
| What's wrong with being shady? Morals are a meme
| hnbad wrote:
| Marvel films, which (like much of big budget Hollywood at
| this point sadly) at this point are infamous for their
| exploitation of cheap unorganized effects artists, are
| probably a bad example for something being "not shady".
|
| HN actually discourages high engagement by having the front
| page items change fairly slowly (rather than
| algorithmically customizing them to each user), not making
| scrolling beyond that (i.e. pagination and the "latest"
| feed) any less awkward to navigate than it has been forever
| and actively preventing you from commenting too much within
| a given timeframe (which it doesn't actively disclose when
| you hit the limit). That's probably a bad example for
| something being "shady".
| nine_k wrote:
| Imagine that our bitter enemies invented a superior logistics
| tool, known as the wheel. Should we even consider adopting
| it, given its clearly ethically unacceptable origins?
|
| If you think that this is an entirely artificial example,
| consider the fact that the same man designed the V-2 rockets
| which were hitting London during WWII, and the Saturn-5
| rockets which brought astronauts to Moon:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun
| barrell wrote:
| Imagine that our bitter ememies invented a superior
| logistics tool, known as the wheel. They also invented
| airplanes and the concept of blitzkrieg. Should we
| attribute their success to the wheel, and study how it was
| designed, since they clearly had a mighty army?
|
| I think the idea being debated here is that it's impossible
| to know whether the business practices would work without
| the lack of ethics. It might not be a good case study or a
| direction you want people going in as it might put them in
| some of the ethically compromising positions, or even worse
| require people to put themselves in those positions to work
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| If we're going this way, the next question - and a real
| one, this time - is whether we should study and use the
| medical data they acquired doing very unethical things to
| prisoners.
| barrell wrote:
| I'm not going to pretend to have an answer to that
| question, it's above my pay grade.
|
| But I would be comfortable pushing back on the idea that
| we should structure and operate our medical clinics like
| theirs because they made scientific breakthroughs.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| It's above my paygrade too, but what I remember from
| occasional discussions of that case is that:
|
| - The obvious take is, the evil deed's already been done,
| the knowledge it produced can save lives and can't
| realistically be re-gathered any other way, so why not
| use it?
|
| - The counter to that is, using it legitimizes and
| encourages similar acts in the future.
|
| (Personally, I can see the encouragement angle; disagree
| with legitimization.)
|
| - There's often a side thread going on about how the
| atrocities and those who committed them were not Up To
| Scientific Standards, therefore all their data is
| invalid, so there's no reason to use it anyway.
|
| (Personally, I think this is a lame cop-out, used when
| one feels the ethical argument is too weak to stand on
| its own.)
| a_cul wrote:
| Something to note here is that most (if not all) of the
| "medical data" acquired by Axis experiments is useless: a
| lot of it is on the order of "if we make someone really
| cold they die". The methodology was, unsurprisingly,
| generally biased, non-reproducible, and often cruel for
| the sake of it, rather than unethical out of necessity.
|
| IMO there's a nice parallel between useless evidence from
| bad experiments, and useless business practices from
| unethical companies. If you want to take the lessons but
| leave the bad stuff, often you'll find there's nothing
| left.
| sobani wrote:
| > Imagine that our bitter ememies invented a superior
| logistics tool, known as the wheel. They also invented
| airplanes and the concept of blitzkrieg. Should we
| attribute their success to the wheel, and study how it
| was designed, since they clearly had a mighty army?
|
| If you replace "wheel" with "jerrycan", then that's
| exactly what happened.
|
| Quoting from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerrycan :
|
| > Such was the appreciation of the cans in the war effort
| that President Franklin Roosevelt noted, "Without these
| cans it would have been impossible for our armies to cut
| their way across France at a lightning pace which
| exceeded the German Blitzkrieg of 1940."
| voltaireodactyl wrote:
| Also notable: the first was accomplished under a fascist
| government intent on violent world domination, and the
| latter was completed under a (arguably less fascist,
| depending on exact time frame) different government,
| specifically because in the meantime there was a large
| scale critique of the people running the aforementioned
| initial government by (roughly) the rest of the world.
|
| So I believe your point leads to the conclusion that
| critiques at this time of the ruling authorities within
| this company might lead to a reorganization of control,
| such as might best position any further advancements to
| benefit a wider population in more pro social ways.
|
| (von Braun being a clear "A-Player", not a CEO, given the
| terminology at hand)
| huijzer wrote:
| Why would a wheel be ethically unacceptable? The example
| you're replying to talks about tobacco companies and
| cancer. A wheel doesn't cause cancer.
| nine_k wrote:
| I made an absurd example exactly to show that there is a
| limit after which the argument of "tainted source" should
| not apply.
|
| (Regarding tobacco, see a different thread:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41552737)
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| > Imagine that our bitter enemies invented a superior
| logistics tool
|
| Imagine instead that narrow, shallow, obsessed people
| (NSOBs) built a superior Banality Machine for absorbing the
| time and attention of suckers. The more suckers who watch,
| the more revenue earned by NSOB Inc.
|
| > Should we even consider adopting it, given its clearly
| ethically unacceptable origins?
|
| I regret that we have done so. At global scale.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| The problem is not the inventor but the invention itself.
| In your quite inept analogy, the wheel itself is somehow
| unethical. IE, they didn't invent the wheel they invented
| the slave.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| "Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
|
| That's not my department, " says Wernher von Braun.
| xupybd wrote:
| This is not comparable
| COAGULOPATH wrote:
| >Being monetarily successful does not mean you're good or
| shouldn't be criticised.
|
| Is anyone saying that Mr Beast is good and shouldn't be
| criticised? I can't see them.
| thisisabore wrote:
| No but bro, listen bro, he does numbers.
| oulipo wrote:
| Exactly!! we need to stop conflating "efficiency" with
| "success"
|
| Being efficient at destroying the planet is NOT success
|
| If anything we need to go slower and gentler
| (environmentally, socially, economically), not "faster"
| wrasee wrote:
| But also perhaps not conflating "success" with morally
| positive outcomes.
|
| Being efficient at destroying the planet is to successfully
| destroy the planet.
|
| I think the original point was precisely to separate the
| concepts that make something successful - to be successful
| at what you do - from a judgement on the outcomes - the
| thing that you are doing.
| mihaic wrote:
| > But also perhaps not conflating "success" with morally
| positive outcomes.
|
| The reason why I would conflate them is that success had
| a positive social implication. You get respect if you're
| successful. In order to separate these concept, I'd use
| language that doesn't have positive connotations.
| "Efficient" is more than accurate.
| this_steve_j wrote:
| The scope of "success" under examination in this guide is
| tailored for an artificial economic organism that wants
| to survive and capitalize in a particular competitive
| marketplace (YouTube).
|
| It is almost certainly not generalizable advice for
| achieving "success" in the cooperative game of life on
| earth.
| zooq_ai wrote:
| Why should I adhere to some loser definition of morals?
|
| You do know Taliban, Karl Marx and Christians can all
| make moral arguments to argue against something
| reichstein wrote:
| "Success" is to achieve the intended goal, without causing
| new problems that outweigh the benefit of reaching that
| goal.
|
| Reaching the goal is not a moral measurement, it is all
| about efficiency. If you don't reach the goal, your
| efficiency is zero. The moral question is what new problems
| are acceptable. That's where reasonable people can
| disagree.
| bnralt wrote:
| > If anything we need to go slower and gentler
| (environmentally, socially, economically), not "faster"
|
| Do you think we should move slower when it comes to saving
| the planet? From what I can tell your main issue is with
| the goal, not with efficiency itself.
| gregmac wrote:
| > Being efficient at destroying the planet is NOT success
|
| For some businesses being efficient means there is a side-
| effect of destroying the planet. For others it's causing
| customers/employees long-term health effects like cancer.
| Many industries that are considered highly profitable have
| these types of things -- think pharmaceuticals (legal or
| not), lending, gambling.
|
| "Success" in a business generally means being profitable.
| Usually this requires being "efficient" but being efficient
| isn't the goal. Neither is "Net good for society/humanity
| at large" -- at least not the main one, taking priority
| over being profitable.
| t_mann wrote:
| Can you point to the parts of the document, or other
| resources about Mr. Beast, that warrant a comparison with
| tobacco companies?
| ipsento606 wrote:
| > Can you point to the parts of the document, or other
| resources about Mr. Beast, > that warrant a
| comparison with tobacco companies?
|
| The part where the GP says "Lot of people critiquing this,
| but you can't deny the success." invites counterexamples of
| companies that are successful but still deserving of
| critique.
| wesselbindt wrote:
| They make money in ways that others would find morally
| reprehensible. The tobacco industry makes its money off of
| addictive substances that kill millions per year, and
| Donaldson makes content for entertainment that literally
| tortures people in the sense of being a violation of the
| geneva convention. In both cases they're highly efficient
| operations that make a lot of money, but whether or not you
| would call it a success story depends on your definition of
| success. If your definition of successful is "makes money",
| then the tobacco industry, Donaldson, fentanyl dealers, etc
| are indeed successful. If your definition is "the world is
| a better place for its existence", then not so much.
|
| Regarding sources: if you're genuinely interested and not
| just being argumentative for argument's sake, you're
| capable of googling "MrBeast geneva convention" and
| following the sources from there.
| gruez wrote:
| >and Donaldson makes content for entertainment that
| literally tortures people in the sense of being a
| violation of the geneva convention
|
| What specific acts are we talking about? "violation of
| the geneva convention" could mean literally anything
| between "putting red cross symbols on soldiers" and
| "summarily executing civilians", so it doesn't really
| narrow things down. If they're being put in uncomfortable
| positions, but they're not risking long term harm and
| it's voluntary, I don't see what the issue is.
| bulbosaur123 wrote:
| > You could say that about literally any shady business.
|
| Right, and where is the problem with that again?
| 31337Logic wrote:
| Exactly this. Thank you.
|
| We share a planet with nearly 10 billion other people. Money
| isn't everything.
| XorNot wrote:
| > 2. Hiring only A-players. Bloated teams kill startups.
|
| "Just hire good employees, why did no one think of this
| before!"
|
| ...seriously?
| inemesitaffia wrote:
| Good by what measure?
| caseyy wrote:
| > can't deny the success
|
| I don't disagree that there is some value in this knowledge.
| But success has different definitions.
|
| I do not consider Jimmy successful. In relation to classical
| virtues, he hasn't truly lived up to many. That would be
| success to me.
|
| He is popular and his business is rich. Some people consider
| that success, but not all. Not even in business and start-up
| circles.
|
| Edit: some people below (quite remarkably) miss the point
| despite me having spelled it out -- "success has different
| definitions". Somehow they have convinced themselves I said
| that Jimmy has my definition of success, or that he is not
| successful by his own definition. I think everyone who wants to
| understand what I am saying does. If not, I repeat one more
| time -- there is more than one way to measure success. Which is
| correct or not correct -- I do not prescribe. That is all :)
| paulcole wrote:
| > But success has different definitions.
|
| Yes, except doesn't Mr. Beast define the kind of success he's
| aiming for in the PDF?
|
| > I do not consider Jimmy successful.
|
| By the definition he set for success or the one you made up?
| talldatethrow wrote:
| 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.
| paulcole wrote:
| Uh, ok?
|
| If you're going to debate why this guy is/is not a
| success we can all make up our own little definitions and
| go on all day.
|
| But he defined his goals in this PDF and it seems like
| he's reaching/making progress towards those goals.
| talldatethrow wrote:
| 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?
| simonw wrote:
| In this profile from 2022 Jimmy said his goal was to become
| the number one YouTube channel:
| https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-
| features/mrbeas...
|
| According to this Wikipedia page
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-
| subscribed_YouTub... he finally achieved that goal on June 2,
| 2024.
|
| So definitely successful by his own chosen metric.
| daedrdev wrote:
| > 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.
| nothercastle wrote:
| Cutthroat competition but he cracked the formula. I think
| that's success
| thewicked wrote:
| Seems like a version of not counting points and giving all
| the kids a gold medal. It's pink and fluffy.
| kumarvvr wrote:
| Success, but at what cost is more important, for those who are
| evaluating success.
|
| A coal power plant may be enormously successful. But its costs
| to climate are equally important.
|
| We often fail to talk about the other side of the coin.
| lxgr wrote:
| Is anyone seriously denying the success?
|
| What's definitely a valid target of criticism are the methods,
| though.
| zx10rse wrote:
| SBF was very successful too.
| yard2010 wrote:
| That's gross. IMHO, ofc. A bit like scientology or crusade-age
| Christianity, you know it's wrong, but you can't argue with the
| success, so y not?
| amne wrote:
| 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.
| calmbonsai wrote:
| Re-read those operational principles out loud. Now imagine them
| being executed at-scale by a fraudulent enterprise to the net
| detriment of society.
|
| You don't have to imagine very hard.
| nothercastle wrote:
| So most tech startups?
| oulipo wrote:
| 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"
| cdrini wrote:
| 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".
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > that's clearly because people in tech generally value
| efficiency
|
| I think this is you reading this into the comment. They don't
| mention efficiency.
| chii wrote:
| > is BAD, not a "success"
|
| that is your moral view or value. It is not a universal
| value.
|
| Economic success is indeed a thing, and it can be discussed
| separately from moralityl.
| consteval wrote:
| 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.
| refurb wrote:
| > 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.
| meowface wrote:
| If 100% of his watchers were YouTube Premium subscribers and
| none of them ever saw an ad, would you feel differently?
| nothercastle wrote:
| It's still kind if garbage content
| lupusreal wrote:
| Literally nobody is denying that MrBeast is successful so what
| is the point of saying that nobody can deny it?
| jorvi wrote:
| 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.
| spencerchubb wrote:
| 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.
| smt88 wrote:
| > _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.
| javier123454321 wrote:
| This is not a foxcon factory, this is the most famous and
| productive Youtube production company. People here work
| incredibly hard IN ORDER TO get this particular job,
| seeking it out specifically.
|
| > Many people in entertainment feel lucky to be a paid
| employee at all
|
| And this is BY CHOICE.
|
| I fundamentally disagree with your positioning.
| nothercastle wrote:
| Yeah people will do the job for free basically. I don't
| think you could have the same culture if your business
| was cleaning port-a-pottys.
| smt88 wrote:
| 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.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| > where you saw bad culture or micromanaging
|
| Mr. Beast is ultimately the star of the video, so he has to
| micromanage at some point or another. That's his brand. He
| can't let his employees plan a video that he won't like.
|
| I did find the comments about all-nighters off-putting... And
| I personally don't like working on multiple things at the
| same time. But that's personal preference; I don't
| particularly like Mr. Beast's videos, so I don't see myself
| working for his company any time soon.
|
| I'm more concerned about Mr. Beast overextending himself.
| With Mr. Beast (the person) being the brand and the star, I
| don't think he can scale himself much more.
| evilfred wrote:
| literally everyone says they only hire A-players. Beast hired
| someone now accused of sexting with teens. is that an A-player
| hire?
| fabioborellini wrote:
| Maybe the subheading "no does not mean no" can be also taken
| literally.
| marxisttemp wrote:
| > 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.
| darby_nine wrote:
| > 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.
| FactKnower69 wrote:
| >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"
| dayvid wrote:
| 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.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| It is nice to see the red flags in writing ahead of time. After
| all "boys will be boys"
| dayvid wrote:
| 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
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| 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.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| 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.
| xrd wrote:
| I have kids and I'm really bothered by MrBeast. I had to buy
| goddamn chocolate bars at Walmart because of him. I acknowledge
| he is creative and driven but the content is such crap, with a
| few exceptions that my kids point out.
|
| But, what's the alternative?
|
| For example, I love 3brown1blue videos. But, it is too advanced
| even for my eleven year old.
|
| Mark Rober videos are great, and my kids love them, but he's even
| inside MrBeast's orbit. And, he's not putting out as much
| content.
|
| What are the good channels that create creative and stimulating
| videos that are a benefit to humanity.
|
| Does YouTube kill those channels?
| debacle wrote:
| > I had to buy goddamn chocolate bars at Walmart because of
| him.
|
| Nah, you didn't. You're the parent, if you don't like the
| content, don't let your kids watch it.
| np_tedious wrote:
| 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?
| bondarchuk wrote:
| Why watch youtube at all? It's not obligatory.
| maltalex wrote:
| > But, what's the alternative?
|
| Good question. I'm also on the lookout for quality content for
| my kids. I recently learned that YouTube Kids can be put into
| whitelist-only mode, and that specific channels, videos, or
| collections of channels can be picked individually. Google
| aren't making it easy, but the option is there.
|
| > Does YouTube kill those channels?
|
| I don't think it's about YouTube. Mr Beast is good at what he
| does, and manages to produce very marketable content. It's
| fast-food entertainment. It's a newer take on what's been on
| our TV screens for decades in the form of reality TV and game
| shows.
| ChiefNotAClue wrote:
| 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.
| redox99 wrote:
| I don't think buying some chocolate bars is such a big deal.
| Just like buying some Mickey Mouse toy or sticker is fine.
|
| And nothing wrong with some entertainment videos, some leisure
| is good. It doesn't need to be all educational.
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| An alternative would be to use YouTube Kids instead of a
| regular YouTube and to ban MrBeast's channel. Problems solved.
| Jun8 wrote:
| Try Vihart on YT, eg this one is one of the most awesome
| explanations I've seen:
| https://youtu.be/VIVIegSt81k?si=yRlWlEf2-rEICgtk. And kids love
| this stuff.
| userbinator wrote:
| _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.
| saltcod wrote:
| 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.
| raydev wrote:
| The funny thing about those chocolate bars is that (I think)
| they're better than the century old brand names they're
| competing with.
| guywithahat wrote:
| 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
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >But, what's the alternative?
|
| The alternative is grabbing The Little Prince or My Neighbor
| Totoro and watching or reading it with the kids. I have a very
| simple rule, if something isn't good enough to be engaging for
| parents and kids just throw it the hell out. It reminds me of a
| discussion between a Japanese coworker and an American expat.
| The Japanese guy was disgusted by lunchables, and the expat
| went "oh yeah, they're just for kids", and he just said "you
| feed your kids something you wouldn't eat yourself"?
|
| Stop normalizing feeding garbage to children, metaphorically or
| literally. There's enough stimulating media in the world
| outside of Youtube.
| loughnane wrote:
| 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)
| pnathan wrote:
| > But, what's the alternative?
|
| Ban YouTube. Have only 1 movie/TV night.
|
| Mandate books as primary entertainment.
|
| Stock the home library with classic tales of heroism and
| adventure. Own an encyclopedia set.
|
| Reject the brainshinker system and look to works of more
| enduring worth.
|
| Videos should be thoughtful. If that's not possible in the
| family dynamic, shut it down.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| 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.
| GlacierFox wrote:
| I salute you for taking this approach. At least I know your
| kids are going to grow up well-rounded.
| qwertytyyuu wrote:
| Not quite "well rounded" as they'll miss a lot of
| cultural context from YouTube that all the others watch.
| someothherguyy wrote:
| I think many people conflate popular and accessible media
| with essential culture.
| johnfn wrote:
| 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.
| someothherguyy wrote:
| 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.
| johnfn wrote:
| 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.
| rcbdev wrote:
| 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.
| GlacierFox wrote:
| Cultural context with YouTube as the primary source? Are
| you smoking something? Give me some if so.
| johnfn wrote:
| Why on earth would anyone downvote this? This has to be one
| of the most common viewpoints held on HN.
| lostdog wrote:
| Tell your kids they have to perform a challenge worthy of
| getting the chocolate bars.
| kumarvvr wrote:
| > But, what's the alternative?
|
| Avoiding one sided content altogether. Any and all video
| content must be rejected.
|
| Learning to do things from books is the only way we can
| safeguard the next generation from becoming mind fucked zombies
| who have lost the cognitive ability to think for themselves.
| HKH2 wrote:
| > What are the good channels that create creative and
| stimulating videos that are a benefit to humanity.
|
| Kurzgesagt doesn't have daily videos, but it fits that bill.
| chevman wrote:
| 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).
| runeblaze wrote:
| 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
| someothherguyy wrote:
| Or that signaling altruism saves the obscenely wealthy from
| criticism, which is a popular cynical take on the utility of
| philanthropy.
| phito wrote:
| 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".
| runeblaze wrote:
| 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.
| shirro wrote:
| 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.
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| > But, what's the alternative?
|
| Personally, I find YouTube to be unusable if you think of it as
| channel-based. What I do is keep a list of topics and perform a
| search based on the topics.
|
| That pulls in some set of videos, of which maybe about 20-50%
| are exactly what I want. If the search yields no great results,
| it's usually because I've gotten the search wrong or the topic
| isn't well covered on YouTube yet.
|
| With the kids, I don't talk about watching "YouTube", I talk
| about watching "learning videos" and if they want to watch a
| learning video, I ask them to tell me what they want to learn
| before we turn the screens on.
|
| Usually it's building something, like "I want to learn how to
| build a doll house" or "I want to learn how to make a shark
| sculpture
|
| Channels are push content, this is more of a pull approach.
| prmoustache wrote:
| > I had to buy goddamn chocolate bars at Walmart because of
| him.
|
| No you didn't. You chose to do so.
| yeukhon wrote:
| 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
| m3kw9 wrote:
| I see a lot of hating on mr beast for being so mechanical in
| driving views but blame the game, not the player
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Doesn't excuse knowingly encouraging kids to gamble and
| covering for SA, or selling unhealthy chocolate bars to kids
| under the guise of health food.
| mhh__ wrote:
| MrBeast's videos are total slop that I would put serious effort
| towards preventing my children watching if I had some but reading
| this it's immediately obvious why he's successful.
| bondarchuk wrote:
| Some dramatic takes in this thread. Is watching a mr Beast video
| really that much worse than watching Friends or Spongebob or Game
| of Thrones?
| kurisufag wrote:
| never saw GoT, but I wouldn't think so. you put an episode on
| and all of a sudden half an hour has passed.
|
| all these things are just convenient timeskip tools.
| dcchambers wrote:
| At least your two examples try to tell a story. They have some
| artistic integrity.
|
| Mr. Beast has one goal: Eyes on content. For a long as
| possible. There is no artistic vision - every decision is made
| in the name of profit, attention, and addiction.
| shombaboor wrote:
| yeah i thought that was interesting, as if to say, if we made
| a pet torture video that has the most views ever, that's
| what's important. Also how wedded it is to youtube.
| understanding how youtube works is more important that making
| funny or engaging content. it's a reverse of 'if you build it
| they will come' when it comes to excellence.
| yunwal wrote:
| I barely know who Mr. Beast is but isn't his whole channel
| about, like, the joy of doing nice things for people? Like
| yes, it's for profit, and yes, it's schlocky and distasteful
| to us wise adults or whatever, but there's seriously nothing
| you find redeeming about kids enjoying seeing people getting
| their vision restored?
| simonw wrote:
| That's some of his channel. Other bits of his channel are
| about putting people through extreme conditions to try and
| win money.
|
| The Rolling Stone profile has a good breakdown of his
| content cerca 2022:
| https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-
| features/mrbeas...
| chidog12 wrote:
| that's a ridiculous take and blinded by your own
| preferences... It's all content... and it's all trying to get
| "Eyes on content. For a long as possible."
| bondarchuk wrote:
| Indeed. At least when it comes to your regular type of
| broadcast tv we must not have any romantic illusions. One
| of the most glaring tricks is having multiple items within
| a program and round-robining them in short chunks. And even
| the supposedly higher art of netflix shows uses inane stuff
| like cliffhangers and needless sex scenes.
| dcchambers wrote:
| By his own admission in this onboarding document he admits
| his only goal is to make viral youtube video by any means
| necessary. It's all about "hacking" the algorithm and
| peoples' attention faculties.
|
| Contrast that with very traditional Hollywood media - yes,
| _of course_ they want to get people to watch their shows,
| but for the most part they try do that via a story and art.
| Not hacking peoples brains.
|
| His content is like "Reality TV" on steroids. I don't watch
| or believe in traditional "Reality TV" either. Both are
| trash content - amongst the lowest forms of "entertainment"
| available.
| ars wrote:
| > but for the most part they try do that via a story and
| art.
|
| No they don't. When you are young and everything is new
| it seems that way, when you get older you realize it's
| all just nonsense for entertainment.
|
| That's also why film critics seem to hate all films,
| except for the boring ones. They are looking for art, but
| it's not there.
| dbbk wrote:
| I'm not sure I agree. I don't watch his content but from
| reading the document it's quite clear his goal is to make
| stuff that's "fucken funny" - he's not creating any content
| for the sake of it, he wants to entertain himself.
| shalmanese wrote:
| This, fr, is a better explication of "founder mode" than anything
| pg & co have put out about it so far.
| alphazard wrote:
| The bit about A, B, and C players is good.
|
| I had been thinking about this as learning ability (fluid
| intelligence) and institutional knowledge both following a power
| law distribution. Mr. Beast refers to A and B players as being
| sufficiently high in learning ability and only differing in their
| position in the institutional knowledge distribution.
|
| Packaging this effect into a 3 category model definitely makes it
| easier to operationalize. The severance part is important too,
| since there would be hesitancy to terminate even obvious "C
| players".
| trhway wrote:
| Dependencies and critical components - so much of software
| development fails because these aren't understood and managed
| accordingly.
| dcchambers wrote:
| The poor grammar drives me crazy. I get that I am not the target
| employee, but if I walked in to a job and was handed that on my
| first day I'd walk right out based on presentation alone.
| simonw wrote:
| It is at least self-aware on that front: the first page says
| "Sorry in advance for all the run on sentences and grammar
| issues, I'm a youtuber not an author haha."
| dcchambers wrote:
| That shows a total lack of self respect in my opinion. You
| don't have to be an author to put even the tiniest effort
| into your writing in a professional letter like that.
| tpmoney wrote:
| Modern culture is very big on self deprecation and not
| having respect for the tiny details. If you don't hold
| yourself to standards, you can avoid people dragging you
| when you fail to live up to them. Better to say "I'm not an
| author ha ha" and have writing full of flaws, knowing the
| only people that are going to give you grief about it are
| people that "take it too seriously", then to try and
| present a well edited and highly professional piece of text
| and have a mistake missed in editing become the focal point
| of a bunch of pedants who want to tear you down for being
| high and mighty. It's a balancing act to be sure, but
| that's the current side of the spectrum the culture trends
| are on.
| bawolff wrote:
| Know your audience. This seems an intentional affectation.
|
| Like a dude who puts in an hour of work to nail the "just
| rolled out of bed" look. Whether its a good or bad idea is
| debatable, but either way its not due to lack of effort.
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| > professional letter
|
| Define "professional letter". "Chicago manual of style"
| professional letter or some other, less professional
| styleguide? Because if it isn't written using the proper
| styleguide... I'm walking out that door before the first
| hour on the clock.
| latexr wrote:
| He's also rich and could easily afford a one-time editor.
| Heck, I'm sure one of the devoted employees would offer to
| improve it for free.
| simonw wrote:
| I imagine writing like this is a deliberate part of both
| his personal brand and the company culture he is trying to
| create.
|
| MrBeast videos do not get better if everyone uses perfect
| spelling and grammar. They get better if people figure out
| and then execute kind of crass but extravagant "wow"
| moments.
| latexr wrote:
| If it's deliberate there's no reason to apologise and
| follow up with an excuse. Unless you're trying to shield
| yourself from criticism you know you deserve and could
| avoid. That would be dishonest so I'm not going to
| speculate.
| jorl17 wrote:
| Of course there is a reason. It is part of the act and
| the meta-culture.
|
| I'm not saying I like Mr Beast or this document, but it
| seems extremely obvious to me that this document is the
| way it is very intentionally.
|
| The specific sentence offers relatability and a
| (perceived) degree of honesty. Stating the obvious isn't
| always bad -- it often builds empathy and connections.
|
| In my opinion, he is not at all trying to shield himself
| from criticism, he is building a connection with the
| reader.
|
| We are not machines.
| throw16180339 wrote:
| He'd still have to work with the editor and review the
| results; that's at least a couple hours of work. This has a
| substantially lower EV than managing, networking, producing
| videos, etc. I'd make the same call.
| drcode wrote:
| what additional useful information about running a youtube
| production company would you have learned from the document if
| it had better grammar?
| gonzo41 wrote:
| And you're exactly who they are looking to move elsewhere. They
| are looking for people who want to make youtube videos. No faff
| about over font and comma placement.
| scraptor wrote:
| The purpose of the company is to produce youtube videos not
| professionally written internal memos. In fact one might say
| that this is the core message of the document.
| guywithahat wrote:
| One thing I find interesting is that y combinator content (like
| Michael and Dalton videos) don't talk much about team intensity
| and culture aside from cliche terms, but successful teams obsess
| over it. I mean he's literally saying he'll give you $1000 to
| study the handbook, and the handbook says average employees
| should be fired immediately (in all caps). I've never heard
| something like that come from y combinatory, but I've seen other
| successful teams do similar things
| victor106 wrote:
| this is interesting.
|
| what are some resources that you can learn on how to create viral
| titles on existing content?
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| One of the key details missing from the analysis being done in
| this thread is that Jimmy was iterating and figuring out how to
| optimize every part of his content for years before he really
| blew up in popularity. Having a loop where you keep publishing
| content and analyzing all aspects of it is the ultimate key to
| success, given enough time and resources.
|
| As I understand it, MrBeast helped fund the creation of ViewStats
| [0] in order to gather more data on thumbnails and channel /
| video performance over time. Then this knowledge is applied to
| their own content in order to make it even more successful. At
| this point there's probably multiple people who specialize just
| in thumbnail optimization.
|
| Another key detail about MrBeast production is that they target a
| global audience, so they hire famous voice actors of every major
| language to do their voice-overs. A few years before YouTube
| supported multiple audio tracks, they had different channels for
| various languages and regions. Now it's just a drop-down in the
| video settings. Many products fail to take internationalization
| and localization seriously, so their products are unable to
| penetrate non-western markets.
|
| Speaking of international reach, I saw in an interview a few
| years back that MrBeast was trying to expand to the Chinese
| market, but none of his public interviews since then have
| discussed how he's doing there. This goes a bit against the
| extreme focus on YouTube as his primary platform. A quick search
| on bilibili (which I believe is the Chinese equivalent of
| YouTube), shows his latest video hitting 1.6 million views and 8k
| comments, which isn't bad but it doesn't really compare to the
| amount of attention that he gets on YouTube. It seems like even
| the most skilled content creators in the West still struggle to
| break into the Chinese market.
|
| [0] https://www.viewstats.com/
| trogdor wrote:
| I didn't know that YouTube supports multiple audio tracks for
| the same video. Can alternate tracks be uploaded at a later
| point in time? Can the feature be used to replace the original
| audio in a video?
| fngjdflmdflg wrote:
| It's only available for certain channels. You can see more
| info here.[0]
|
| [0] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/13338784
| jesprenj wrote:
| How do they get $1 million+ from a single video? AdSense or
| sponsors?
| shalmanese wrote:
| One distressing trend I've noticed becoming ubiquitous on HN is
| that any writing that is confronting to a consensus worldview
| becomes flooded with highly upvoted comments that are, in
| essence, excuses for why it's not necessary in this instance to
| re-examine your priors.
|
| He's making low value content/the culture of the company is
| horrible/he's a fraud/it's more luck than skill. The actual
| critiques are personalized to the content and, to one extent or
| another, valid, but the _social purpose_ of the critiques is
| universal which is that I felt uncomfortable that reading this
| might mean I have to re-evaluate my worldview and I 'm going to
| dive into the comment section and upvote all the people telling
| me actually, I don't have to do that.
|
| I actually spent over an hour writing 750+ words of my takeaways
| reading this document and shared it privately with a few founder
| friends of mine and I briefly considered also posting to share
| with the community but I took a look at the comments and took a
| look at what I wrote and decided I didn't have the energy to face
| the endless onslaught of nitpicks and misunderstandings that are
| driven, at the end of the day, not by a genuine intellectual
| desire to reach an understanding, but by the need to prove
| emotionally that others are not taking this seriously so I don't
| have to either.
|
| All I can do is be vague and say I think this was an enormously
| valuable piece of writing that is worth engaging seriously for
| what it is as it might change your worldview in several important
| ways.
|
| But also my larger meta-point is that there's a now near
| ubiquitous "sour grapes" attitude that's pervaded HN that makes
| it an extremely unpleasant place to hold a conversation and
| people reading should be aware of this systematic bias when
| reading comments here.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Most of it strikes me as toxic, largely only applicable to YT,
| with a few soiled gems mixed in there.
|
| What are your takeaways?
|
| Thoughts on Tate's Hustlers' University?
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| The "sour grapes" attitude has IMO really started crowding out
| other content. Pretty much any popular content here just has a
| flood of social signaling content all about how morally wrong,
| bad, evil, etc the content is. And if you don't want to pile on
| the commentary, which is all pretty much the same thing
| regurgitated in different ways, then your content just kinda
| languishes at the bottom of the page. I don't really know why
| this kind of content is so engaging but I guess it is. Kinda
| like a sports match where everyone just shouts at how bad the
| other team is or something.
|
| EDIT: My pet theory is that it has to do with the general aging
| of the users here. There's a kind of well-to-do, Western,
| mid-40s (usually male) social opinion I see upvoted a lot here
| that I feel like hits the sweet spot of the folks who still
| read this site regularly. But it's just a theory really.
| __loam wrote:
| It would help if half the content on this site wasn't highly
| unethical lol. It feels like the tech industry is having a
| moment where a lot of us are looking critically at the work
| we're doing and the effects it has on the society we live in.
| Sometimes that's not fun but it is important. Sorry if that
| checks the vibes too much for you.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Okay so now what effect are you having by making this
| ethical criticism? Are you changing the ethical outlook of
| the industry? Are you making a positive ethical impact?
|
| > It feels like the tech industry is having a moment where
| a lot of us are looking critically at the work we're doing
| and the effects it has on the society we live in.
|
| I think you grossly overestimate HN's prominence in the
| tech industry. It _was_ where all the founders hung out 15
| years ago. It 's now just a place where IT workers talk.
|
| > Sometimes that's not fun but it is important. Sorry if
| that checks the vibes too much for you.
|
| No I just do what everyone else does which is talk about
| tech elsewhere. I spent a lot of time over the last 15
| years here so I'm sad that the place has changed, but at
| the end of the day I have several alternatives.
|
| Moreover there's _plenty_ of problems in the world out
| there. A few wars in progress, a genocide or two. My
| relatives spent the last few weeks in hiding because a
| government failed. MrBeast 's engagement practices are
| probably the very lowest of my worries. If only HN comments
| could change the world...
| __loam wrote:
| > Are you changing the ethical outlook of the industry?
| Are you making a positive ethical impact?
|
| I try pretty hard to only work on companies that have at
| least a neutral impact on society. Many of them have had
| an actively positive one.
|
| > I think you grossly overestimate HN's prominence in the
| tech industry.
|
| It's a good thing I wasn't talking solely about
| hackernews then.
| GlacierFox wrote:
| Hey everyone, let's take a leaf out of this guys book and
| only mention ethical concerns if he deems them worthy -
| like wars for example. Anything _lower_ than that isn 't
| worth mentioning because it kills the vibes. Wonder if
| he'll see this as he doesn't use this site anymore and
| talks with the intellectual founder-boys elsewhere...
| j33zusjuice wrote:
| Founders aren't here, but all the workers are, and
| they're overestimating HN's prominence? Or are you
| overvaluing the position of founder. Like you're on some
| Randian philosophy shit, or something.
| twojacobtwo wrote:
| > I think you grossly overestimate HN's prominence in the
| tech industry. It was where all the founders hung out 15
| years ago. It's now just a place where IT workers talk.
|
| You either missed the point of the GP comment, or you
| think that it's entirely pointless to discuss important
| issues unless it's with people of prominence. Depressing
| if it's the latter, but given how you started your post,
| I'm leaning toward that interpretation. That's some kind
| of fucked up elitism right there.
| devjab wrote:
| I think it mostly happened when HN became flooded by Reddit
| users. One of the reason I think this is because of how HN
| and Reddits way of dealing with new lines is different. In a
| lot of the comments on HN that I would consider to be fitting
| on GPs point you'll see a format a long the lines of this:
|
| This is the first line of my paragraph.
|
| This is the second line of my paragraph.
|
| They are separated because HN and Reddit formatting is
| different.
| mkl wrote:
| I think that's because people are commenting on mobile,
| where the lines are way shorter. What looks like a
| paragraph on my phone (e.g. this comment), turns out to
| just be a line or two.
| rootsudo wrote:
| This is also how 4chan differentiated users, by double
| space and ironically using >greentext wrong. I thought it
| was ironic to see this comment here, because, I've been
| using the old 4chan archives as datasets for interesting
| things. https://archive.org/details/imageboard_datasets
| Jerrrrrrry wrote:
| >doubly ironic is that 99% of HN users use both of those
| supported features completely incorrectly
| mrmetanoia wrote:
| This site has a lot of interesting people that did and do
| interesting "hacker" type things that keep me coming back,
| but a lot of commenting is people looking to build things of
| questionable value, legality, or social good and sell them
| off and gtfo before the cracks show.
|
| Less "Hacker" More "Greed via Computer" So the idea that they
| aren't bothered by Mr Beast's lack of integrity is because
| they too find deceit acceptable so long as they profit.
| Because, someone else before him did, so why shouldn't he?
| It's toxic greed all the way down in this view.
|
| the bizarre social Darwinism nonsense that permeates the
| internet has done a nice job of taking this antisocial
| mindset - passersby at a glance recognize it quite rightly as
| the ideology of the asshole - and rebranded it as 'smart' and
| a mere recognition of the 'real world' (much to the confusion
| of people succeeding and enjoying the company of others doing
| so without robbing one another)
| troad wrote:
| Thank you for putting this in words; it's been rattling
| around in my head too.
|
| I feel like the Peter Thiel world has eaten the Moxie
| Marlinspike world, and this is such a huge, monstrous loss
| for intellectual curiosity, individual liberty, and human
| flourishing.
| DrNosferatu wrote:
| Proof you're right, is that it seems you received a ton
| of negative votes because of that!
|
| I feel valuable opinions (many times countercurrent and
| unpopular) are downvoted because of the cognitive
| dissonance they cause "some" around here.
| necovek wrote:
| I disagree with the GP simply because this has been the
| state of the world since, well, forever. Witness the
| entire hippie and rock culture of the 60s and beyond.
| Imbalance of wealth and non-proportionality to labour has
| been a topic for millenia, not for decades.
|
| And this has not led to any loss of intellectual
| curiosity or "eaten" any of the non-mainstream world.
|
| Basically, there is always the mainstream, and there is
| always the counter-culture. HN lives in this weird
| mixture where it brings together both profit-seeking
| minds, but also is majorly a community of rebel types
| (hackers, freedom [not just software] aficionados and
| academics, just to name a few -- and obviously, not all
| of them are the rebel types, but they are certainly not
| the "mainstream").
|
| And each of us also lives somewhere on that N-dimensional
| continuum between searching for profit, fame/recognition,
| other mainstream behaviours and personal values which
| don't align with the "mainstream".
| robotstop wrote:
| I wonder if it would be possible to create a clone of HN
| without a pervasive reactionary tendency, and what you'd
| need to tweak to make that work.
| seizethecheese wrote:
| Wait. You're answering why this site is flooded with morale
| outrage with us vs them moral outrage?
| kombookcha wrote:
| The call is coming from inside the house!
| Jerrrrrrry wrote:
| the insightful intelligent discourse that this site's
| audience brings often lets the darker side of that blessing
| - resentment for the successful - to surface.
|
| whether that is convenient altruism masquerading as a
| disdain for greed or sheer jealousy at their own lack of
| agency or fortuna or virtu is for their own ego to
| hopefully one day confront.
| czhu12 wrote:
| Could not agree more, these days I feel like I only really
| read more technical posts where "sour grapes" comments are
| hard to insert. Basically anything about politics, tech,
| finance, management, news, the top few comments are so
| predictably negative its exhausting.
| throw10920 wrote:
| > Pretty much any popular content here just has a flood of
| social signaling content all about how morally wrong, bad,
| evil, etc the content is.
|
| I've noticed a similar general trend for some kinds of posts.
| (the more technical ones tend to escape this) The fix is that
| when you see posts with that kind of social signaling,
| downvote and flag them.
|
| The downvote is because these posts are always extremely
| uninteresting, low-effort, and detrimental to HN as a whole.
|
| The flag is because these posts almost always break the HN
| guidelines in multiple ways, e.g. "Eschew flamebait. Avoid
| generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.", "Please don't use
| Hacker News for political or ideological battle.", "Please
| don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post
| to complain about in the thread."
|
| This is one of the few ways that we can continue to avoid HN
| from turning into Reddit - by self-moderating. Dang seems to
| take a light touch to moderation and does almost zero
| curation, so it's up to the users to help keep HN about
| intellectual curiosity and avoid degenerating into Reddit.
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| Slashdot got like that way back 20 years ago... every article
| about technology was a bunch of gumps wondering why we would
| ever need whatever tech the article was about.
|
| It's pretty out of touch, exhausting and kinda makes me feel
| embarrassed for whoever posted it.
|
| People think they are so high and mighty and have everything
| figured out. The fact is, they are just an average human
| trying to make it through this world like everyone else. Just
| like me, just like you. Nobody has it figured out.
|
| And to go back onto topic, I thought the leaked PDF was
| fascinating. There is a _lot_ of good management stuff in
| that document.
| __loam wrote:
| You really are condescending to us over Mr.Beast's management
| style right now. Hackernews is beyond parody.
| mondobe wrote:
| One of the biggest (and most imitated) channels... on the
| biggest video-on-demand platform to ever exist... Yeah, not
| worth being "condescending" over.
| __loam wrote:
| Maybe as a case study for the structural failures of
| algorithmic feeds. Should founders really be looking at
| what looks like a toxic micromanagment culture for pearls
| of wisdom? Maybe I'm just a type C employee who needs to be
| excised rather than a type A who will pretend they're an
| owner.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| N-gate died FAR too soon.
| aliasxneo wrote:
| You're not alone. Lately, I've found myself skimming towards
| the middle/bottom of comments due to this observation. I
| suppose the more normalized it becomes, the more people feel
| encouraged to continue writing with this attitude.
| 121789 wrote:
| What changed your worldview? It was a fine read but it mostly
| boiled down to project management basics, some format
| optimizations, and some storytelling basics.
|
| I thought it was an interesting behind the scenes look at how
| seriously they take their "art" but nothing world changing.
| Which part of the article did that for you?
| paulcole wrote:
| > What changed your worldview
|
| They're not saying it changed their worldview. Their point is
| that if a person is just immediately nitpicking it and
| dismissing it, then there's probably something in it that can
| change their worldview. That person's project management and
| storytelling skills probably suck (because most people's
| project management and storytelling skills suck).
| mattmanser wrote:
| It's the weekend on HN, different crowd, often very negative
| and comments that imho are more akin to reddit quality.
|
| I try and remember to not HN at the weekend, obviously forget
| sometimes. I tend to find sticking to Ask HN is better at the
| weekend.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| One thing that woud help real people deal with internet
| comments and content is switching from a binary "true" vs
| "false" dichotomy, eg "this is good", "this is false", etc.
| That is, everything must be stamped with some version of a
| binary label.
|
| Instead, a trinary should be used, so among true and false, you
| can have undefined. Or, more importantly for value judgements,
| "it doesnt matter".
|
| And of course, like things in javasvript, everything should
| probably just live as undefined, and there should be plenty of
| guardrails before choosing the other states.
| LeroyRaz wrote:
| Please do share your thoughts. It seems a shame to let
| nitpickers ruin the community for others.
| mihaic wrote:
| Have you considered that the sour grapes attitude actually
| comes from an understanding of the world, and how everything
| has been turned only into profit maximization?
|
| And that the nitpicking is merely a failure to express that
| understanding of the world, especially since it seems like pro-
| status quo commenters don't care to learn more?
|
| I think I'm one of the sour grapes commenters often, and I've
| very often tried to have patience to explain in depth where my
| opinions come from. My greatest frustration is trying to
| describe for instance why someone like Mr Beast is antisocial
| (as I actually did a long time ago), and then being met by
| responses like "he's obviously doing something right to get all
| those views and he's promoting altruism", responses that
| obviously never bother to understand what my point was.
|
| If think if we really are supposed to improve the quality of
| discussions, asking more questions should be common when we
| fundamentally disagree so much. On fundamental disagreements,
| either the other party is stupid/naive/uninformed or they have
| fundamentally different principles that we might not
| understand, and without which a response is just flaming.
|
| Later edit: I actually think the document by Mr Beast is
| exceptionally well written, and most startups could apply the
| main lessons from it. I still think his output is extremely
| antisocial.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > And that the nitpicking is merely a failure to express that
| understanding of the world, especially since it seems like
| pro-status quo commenters don't care to learn more?
|
| I agree with you on this but I don't think it's a failure. I
| think people just get tired after a while. They get tired,
| and then they start displaying their disapproval in ways that
| require less work.
|
| It's just easier than typing out all those words and being
| ignored.
|
| > My greatest frustration is trying to describe for instance
| why someone like Mr Beast is antisocial and then being met by
| responses that obviously never bother to understand what my
| point was
|
| It's really tiresome.
|
| At some point you start to realize that you have
| _fundamentally different values_ than the people you 're
| trying to discuss things with, that these values are
| irreconcilable and that further argument will just make
| people hate you instead of convincing them.
|
| This isn't really about "sour grapes", we have _moral
| objections_ to what others are doing, and there 's no point
| in trying to have those arguments with people who do those
| things for a paycheck.
| pembrook wrote:
| > _Have you considered that the sour grapes attitude actually
| comes from an understanding of the world_
|
| I would argue the opposite. Often the comments that OP is
| describing are people who have very little knowledge of the
| topic at hand, only strongly held emotional feelings based on
| some narrative that appeals to their bias.
|
| The problem is, HN is a crowd of people who grew up believing
| they would all become the next Steve Jobs...a decade or two
| later, the chips have fallen, and most of us have not become
| that (yet many have had to watch their former peers become
| wildly successful). So what we have now is a community of
| bitter, frustrated, and resentful people hurling those
| feelings onto whatever the topic of the day is.
|
| Instead of accepting your jealousy and failure to achieve
| [insert desired outcome], it's much easier to believe
| that...whomever or whatever becomes successful...is doing so
| not out of merit, but out of deceit. By placing yourself on a
| higher moral pedestal, you avoid the pain of direct
| comparison. Ex: _Sure, [insert person or company] is
| successful, but it 's because they prey on [insert moral
| failing of both the product and the people who desire it]!_
| alphan0n wrote:
| >I would argue the opposite...
|
| Proceeds to not describe the opposite, and instead projects
| the viewpoint of the generation that grew up believing that
| becoming social media icons was the equivalent to being
| Steve Jobs.
|
| We just recognize the grifter attitudes and process from
| extensive exposure.
| smolder wrote:
| I never intended to be the next Steve Jobs, I just expected
| that my dedication to learning and building useful skills
| would be rewarded in some sense. Things aren't that simple,
| of course.
| tylersmith wrote:
| Why did you expect that? Why would someone reward your
| personal choice in dedication?
| elliotec wrote:
| A reward does not need to come from "someone", and
| usually doesn't.
|
| You should expect reward from dedication because you'll
| get it. Not from some god on high or some random person
| called Tyler Smith. It's from yourself or the fruits of
| your labor.
| quataran wrote:
| Many people expect ""rewards"" in the form of making a
| living, having a stable salary, maybe supporting a
| family. Why would someone reward a personal choice in
| dedication? Usually because it's useful to them,
| economically.
| smolder wrote:
| I had a much more utopian and somewhat deluded outlook
| growing up. It was based on the things adults told me,
| e.g. at school, in the boy scouts, and elsewhere, or
| absorbed from fiction with a utopian outlook like Star
| Trek TNG. I think there's an impulse to shelter kids and
| instill hope in them which can foster a blindness to the
| dog-eat-dog ugliness of the world.
|
| Act with morals, work hard, self-improve, and everything
| will work out!
|
| I'm not the least or most successful of my peers, but I
| am sympathetic to bitterness and pretty bitter myself
| that people aren't _better_ , that banal evil and
| selfishness and deceit are so omnipresent.
| klyrs wrote:
| I love it when the community psychoanalyzes itself
| lxgr wrote:
| So the only reason somebody might criticize
| somebody/something is... jealousy?
|
| Can you really not think of any
| powerful/wealthy/influential/successful/... person that you
| just have a simple fundamental value disagreement with, and
| would definitely not want to be in their shoes even given
| the opportunity?
| pembrook wrote:
| I'm not saying the root of _all_ criticism is jealousy.
| Obviously there 's legitimate utilitarian value
| judgements to be made on any particular human activity.
|
| However, I would argue that on this particular forum, in
| 2024, there's a lot of people pretending they are making
| "highly rational" value assessments which are in fact
| emotional upvote blankets. It feels like a vibe shift
| over the last 10 years from a community of optimistic
| entrepreneurial types to a community of, as another
| commenter eloquently put it, Nietzschean "Last Men."
| necovek wrote:
| That's a bit tautological: in any popular forum, there
| are going to be "a lot of people pretending they are
| making 'highly rational' value assessments" -- or really,
| doing anything at all.
|
| HN also has a _lot_ of the "other" type (those who are
| rational but honest and objective), and the main
| distinction should be which of those dominate. And I'd
| argue instead that on HN, that group dominates with their
| comments and upvotes/downvotes.
|
| Eg. I consider myself the "engineer" or "hacker" type of
| person: someone who critically looks at most things, and
| is quick to come up with ideas for improvement ("what
| could be better?", which is really, to criticize), and
| need to remember to acknowledge the positives and praise
| the good. I drew more motivation from being involved with
| free and open source software or academia than from ever
| wanting to be "the next Steve Jobs". I totally don't see
| HN as the echo chamber, but quite the opposite.
| pembrook wrote:
| Agreed that it's definitely not everybody. But it feels
| like the "sour grapes" cohort is the fastest growing one,
| and increasingly is tilting all discussions that
| direction.
|
| HN feels like a bunch of people bitter about AI, bitter
| about social media, bitter about the Saas model, bitter
| about Crypto, bitter about ads, bitter about privacy,
| bitter about capitalism, bitter about Elon Musk, bitter
| about every damn thing imaginable. Like a bunch of grumpy
| old men, we don't like new things here, the 90s were the
| peak of the internet and computing apparently.
|
| The archetype HN holds in highest regard would be an
| anonymous European socialist lone Mother Theresa/Jack
| Reacher hacker living off the grid (privacy reasons, of
| course) and grinding away at open source dev utilities
| out of the goodness of their heart. Anything outside of
| that? Profit maximizing drivel intended to trick the dumb
| masses!
| throw974337 wrote:
| You articulated this better than I would ever could. Yes,
| I absolutely agree. Many people here seem bitter or have
| an idealistic point of view (perhaps due to the
| bitterness?) that doesn't match the real world.
| smaudet wrote:
| > Many people here seem bitter or have an idealistic
| point of view
|
| It is the opposite of idealism to see the world as it is.
| Pragmatism is rooted in acknowledging _both_ the good and
| bad.
|
| Idealism is ignoring the bad in the name of "pragmatism".
| Maybe you have to ignore it for your Public Relations
| metrics, but not for your executive or engineering
| perspective(s).
| smaudet wrote:
| > But it feels like the "sour grapes" cohort is the
| fastest growing one, and increasingly is tilting all
| discussions that direction.
|
| > Like a bunch of grumpy old men, we don't like new
| things here, the 90s were the peak of the internet and
| computing apparently.
|
| I invite you to consider, based on your own wording, that
| you are doing more feeling than rationalizing. It is some
| work, and perhaps not completely possible, to do a
| comprehensive and correct meta analysis aiming to gauge
| the state of rational vs non-rational commentary on HN.
|
| > bitter about AI, bitter about social media, bitter
| about the Saas model, bitter about Crypto, bitter about
| ads, bitter about privacy, bitter about capitalism,
| bitter about Elon Musk, bitter about every damn thing
| imaginable
|
| The fact that the world is imperfect is not a reason to
| ignore that the world is imperfect. One must of course
| satisfy their Ego and make some peace with the world that
| is around them that it is in some sense "good", but the
| act of a rational mind, after it is done indulging the
| (necessary?) behaviors of the animal in which it resides,
| is to relentlessly nitpick, criticize, deconstruct the
| world around it, as far is it is possible, without
| feeling.
|
| Yes, all those things suck, or have things that suck
| about them. If one of them is the field in which you
| work, you may even resent the criticism. And yet, it is
| only by acknowledging what is wrong that we can build and
| do what is (more) right.
|
| Perhaps what I will say, is that if HN is supposed to be
| a place of technical innovation, it is undeniably true
| that it is no longer possible to easily innovate,
| anymore. And if that is true, then there should some
| discussion of all the ways that what has been built now
| constrains/no longer makes possible the alternatives.
| That is not something you can change with a "happy go
| lucky attitude" or renouncing a cynical one. In fact, one
| can argue that "can do no harm" attitude is what has
| brought about this venture. Perhaps a slower, more
| considered approach, would have resulted in a better
| outcome.
| mech975 wrote:
| I think that when people are jealous of others, they
| cloak this motivation.
|
| To give an example with interpersonal relationships-
| never in my adult life have I encountered an adult who
| freely admits that jealousy is their motivation for
| attacking the reputation of a friend, but it happens all
| the time.
| klik99 wrote:
| The HN community is way more diverse than that, though
| you're probably spot on for a slice of the community. At
| least in my experience they are nowhere near the majority.
| TMWNN wrote:
| >The problem is, HN is a crowd of people who grew up
| believing they would all become the next Steve Jobs...a
| decade or two later, the chips have fallen, and most of us
| have not become that (yet many have had to watch their
| former peers become wildly successful). So what we have now
| is a community of bitter, frustrated, and resentful people
| hurling those feelings onto whatever the topic of the day
| is.
|
| Your description well fits someone who is not on HN (and is
| well known for being very anti-HN).
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40826280>
| robotstop wrote:
| I never went through a phase of admiring Steve Jobs, and to
| me the word "hacker" still has connotations of alleviating
| oppression. This post amounts to "you're just jealous!" - a
| total cop-out given the myriad ways this website and the
| people on it are /making the world worse/.
| fragmede wrote:
| Comparison is the thief of joy.
|
| -Theo
| naming_the_user wrote:
| I think that this may apply to some people but as a blanket
| statement it feels incorrect because there are tons of
| counterexamples.
|
| Plenty of very successful people that I know personally
| think that attention-hacking stuff like Mr Beast videos,
| YouTube/Instagram/TikTok shorts etc are bad news.
|
| Hell, I wouldn't consider myself Steve Jobs level, but I
| think I've done alright, and I feel that way, so, er, where
| does that leave me? Do I need 700 million or whatever for
| it to not be sour grapes? There are plenty of extremely
| successful (whether financial or otherwise) individuals
| that I do respect.
| mihaic wrote:
| I've seen what you describe often, people that are simply
| bitter and spew hate. But does jealousy and bitterness
| invalidate their point of view?
|
| I've founded two start-ups in my life, both still
| generating revenue and still alive but practically failures
| for their intent. The first one failed primarily since I
| didn't know how to execute, had no understanding of
| business model and distribution, all the classics. The
| second one I think should have been much more successful
| were it not for a lot of random factors: covid, scheming
| employees, much harder sales cycles, etc. You may think I'm
| rationalizing this, but I've had enough self-doubt to reach
| this conclusion.
|
| I am jealous of the people that founded start-ups 10 years
| before me, and which gave bad advice that I realized too
| late to be bad. But at the same time, does this invalidate
| my view that the entire ecosystem is deeply corrupt and
| unfair?
|
| Success and failure are a matter of luck and circumstance
| to a large degree. This implies that outside of a fee
| meritorious success stories (see the original 90s video of
| Bezos arguing why book are best to start as a niche), most
| success stories in the startup world have no more merit
| than your own, so why wouldn't you expect negative feelings
| to exist?
| gizmo wrote:
| It's on you to figure out how the world actually works
| instead of taking the words of people who fell into
| riches for gospel truth. It's a hard lesson to learn,
| especially if you have to pay the price of watching your
| startups fail despite your best efforts. Sour grapes and
| bitterness is how people react when they discover, years
| too late, that they badly misplayed their cards. The
| anger is then directed at the injustice of the system
| when in reality what held people back was not that the
| game is somewhat rigged but a failure to understand the
| actual rules.
|
| Bezos won because he is a cutthroat entrepreneur who
| deeply understands the rules. The Amazon story is a Bezos
| creation, specifically designed to draw attention away
| from the ugly parts of Amazon and to make Bezos look like
| a plucky underdog fighting for consumers. It's a PR
| narrative and hilariously distorted.
| mihaic wrote:
| Sure, put the blame on the individual instead of
| acknowledging that the lies we were fed in our youth held
| us back.
| MyThoughts100 wrote:
| This has to be one of the most thoughtless comments I've
| read on the thread. You don't know about the lives of other
| commentors but are happy to make huge generalizations about
| them and in the process commit the same thinking error that
| you're accusing them of making. Do you not see the irony in
| that?
| wrsh07 wrote:
| Right, a challenge with an artifact like this is that the
| writing is good. And it's a lengthy read. The early
| commenters almost by definition haven't read it and can only
| comment about their opinions on the creative output of Mr
| Beast
|
| As someone who has assiduously avoided watching his videos
| (because of this opinion), I was impressed by the document
| because it is incredibly practical. The advice about
| communication, managing critical components and bottlenecks -
| very very good.
|
| Of course he is singlemindedly focused on building a massive
| YouTube channel. In the employee handbook it does not say: we
| treat you well and do the most ethical thing
|
| It says: come here and work hard, we will make a big YouTube
| channel. (Not: a YouTube channel that is good for society!!
| Just big!!)
| cdchn wrote:
| What did you think was well written about it? Did it provide
| any useful or unique insights? The writing itself seemed
| terrible and riddled with spelling errors.
| gabesullice wrote:
| > What did you think was well written about it?
|
| I think it was well written because you could clearly hear
| his voice through the writing and empathize with his
| internal struggle with being in a position of authority
| while also feeling unqualified for the job.
|
| > Did it provide any useful or unique insights?
|
| As someone who has been very frustrated in the past by my
| perception of the inefficiency of communicating "up and
| over" instead of talking laterally to an engineer on
| another team, I thought he succinctly communicated why it's
| often necessary and helped me understand the value of that
| practice.
|
| > The writing itself seemed terrible and riddled with
| spelling errors.
|
| Orthography is only one aspect what makes writing good or
| bad. And a relatively less relevant one IMO.
| cdchn wrote:
| >you could clearly hear his voice through the writing
|
| That's certainly true. I'm surprised there wasn't an
| embedded provocative thumbnail for the document at the
| very top.
| roenxi wrote:
| No chance it comes from understanding the world, it is an
| unfortunate social effect where attacking is much easier than
| defending. It is particularly apparent in politics where it
| has to be at least an order of magnitude easier to attack an
| opposing candidate for their weaknesses rather than defend a
| friendly candidate for some minor flaw.
|
| And there isn't anything wrong with profit maximisation; we
| use profits to make decisions about resource allocation. That
| matters a lot, small inefficiencies leading to waste
| magnified over the entire economy represent huge damage to
| the people scraping by on the margins.
| throw10920 wrote:
| > Have you considered that the sour grapes attitude actually
| comes from an understanding of the world, and how everything
| has been turned only into profit maximization?
|
| I would hope not, because that's not really a thing to be
| "considered", because it's not factual (as implied by the
| word "understanding"), but an opinion.
|
| There's very little empirical evidence for the claim that
| "everything has been turned only into profit maximization".
| It's not something that's true or false - it's a worldview,
| an emotional outlook. One can imagine other worldviews like
| "the profit maximization is a direct result of the government
| not doing its job to break up monopolies" or "I disagree,
| very few of the companies I interact with are doing profit
| maximization in a way that significantly negatively impacts
| me". You can argue about which of those is "true" and find
| various factoids on the internet that "back them up", but
| ultimately they're just ways that you look at the world with
| little empirical basis.
|
| As such, predicating all of your comments on them and pushing
| them at every turn is _boring_ , and against the purpose of
| HN, which is intellectual curiosity. Reviewing the guidelines
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) should
| pretty quickly tell you why this content isn't appropriate
| for HN:
|
| > On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find
| interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If
| you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be:
| anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
|
| > Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet
| tropes.
|
| These "sour grapes" comments and cynicism-without-substance
| comments are very clearly not gratifying to one's
| intellectual curiosity, and almost always fall into the realm
| of generic tangents and internet tropes.
|
| There's a place for activism, but it's not here.
| infecto wrote:
| The phrase "other party is stupid" really stood out to me,
| and it perfectly illustrates the problem I see. Instead of
| recognizing that people might have fundamentally different
| principles, upbringing, culture, or simply not be fully
| informed on a topic, the first conclusion you jump to is that
| they are stupid.
| mentos wrote:
| .
| evertedsphere wrote:
| " _my_ summary "
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I kind of agree. "sour grapes" is usually correct. But it's
| also usually the least productive when we're here just talking,
| not doing.
| DaoVeles wrote:
| Absolutely, some days I could be convinced that people would
| fight back with me saying "water is wet".
|
| When you see those really great things here it does restore
| some faith in the place but they are getting further apart all
| the time. A real shame.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| > excuses for why it's not necessary in this instance to re-
| examine your priors.
|
| Not being funny, how often is this the answer:
|
| I didn't have one prior, I'm being told what to think by "smart
| people" online and I make my identity alignment with them. I'm
| empty and can't think of anything on my own, so when I read
| something, I add it to a memory bank to bring up later in life
| in conversation with others to come across as "knowing a little
| bit about everything"
| calmbonsai wrote:
| Um well, Mr. Beast IS a fraud (do a casual search), the content
| is crass, exploitative, and it's perfectly reasonable to
| critique a person when they have a personalized brand.
|
| This is no different than what's done in ANY entertainment
| media contract negotiation that takes place with "on-air
| talent".
| guywithahat wrote:
| I realize this is semantics but he's not a fraud, because he
| delivers on the things he says. If he didn't spend 48 hours
| (or however long) underground that would make him a fraud,
| but he did. The content might be of dubious quality, but it's
| not fraudulent
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| See https://youtu.be/k5xf40KrK3I
|
| It alleges that many of the "contests" are staged and
| artificially manipulated and potentially violate laws
| around such games. I think to many that might feel like
| fraud.
| calmbonsai wrote:
| I see you haven't done even a casual search.
| guywithahat wrote:
| Here's a video titled "$1 vs $10,000,000 Job!"
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wdjh81uH6FU). He then
| proceeds to look at a number of jobs, with a job that
| make basically no money ranging to an NFL player. It's
| clickbaity, there are a lot of easy jokes in the episode,
| but there's nothing fraudulent. He's not lying about
| anyone's salary, he pays people out in shows where they
| make money, and nobody is being scammed. All of his
| videos are like this. I'm not saying you have to like
| him, but fraud describes something very specific which he
| is not doing.
|
| I'm sure there's some disgruntled employee complaining
| somewhere, but I have not seen any legitimate complaints
| about him. All those "Mr Beast is a fraud!?!" videos have
| no substance, and are just people using his name for
| views.
| GlacierFox wrote:
| Is it just me or is the way you construct sentences jarring and
| hard to read? Not sure if it's my dyslexia but I had trouble
| deciphering the first couple of paragraphs/word jumbles.
| usefulcat wrote:
| Is this meta-meta commentary? I genuinely don't know but if
| so I salute you.
| GlacierFox wrote:
| Haha yeah. I just found those no-period, scattered
| paragraphs personally hard to read and take in.
| cdchn wrote:
| You're spot on; every paragraph is one sentence, except
| for one paragraph that is two sentences.
| windowshopping wrote:
| No you're not alone but I didn't realize it until you said
| it. And I am not dyslexic.
| gk1 wrote:
| +1 I read the whole comment and still have no idea what point
| they're making or even what side they're on.
|
| To the grandparent: if you put in the effort to make yourself
| more clear, you might get the quality responses you wish for.
| antegamisou wrote:
| No, this person/LLM model indeed writes way too long
| sentences.
| TeaBrain wrote:
| It's not you. The entire comment is a disorganized mess of
| poorly thought out and non-cohesive grammar.
|
| In the section quoted below for example, he starts off by
| writing about critiques, in which he appears to have
| immediately grasped for words that aren't suited for the
| purpose, such as how the nonsensical "personalized to" should
| have been "focused on". He add the completely unnecessary
| pseudointellectual "to one extent or another", to make it
| seem like he is intensely judging ideas. He then says the
| "social purpose" is "universal" which I'm not following the
| meaning of at all. I doubt many others are either, but it
| just seems like another pseudointellectual throwaway. He then
| follows that with "which is that I felt uncomfortable that
| reading this might mean I have to re-evaluate my worldview",
| which is perhaps the most atrociously nonsensical and poorly
| laid out sentence fragment I've read in a long time. In the
| part following that, he needed a period before "actually" for
| it to make sense as he likely intended.
|
| Honestly, it seems like he's just trying to write words as
| they come to him as if in a heated and rash spoken
| conversation, in which he has a elevated personal impression
| of erudition, compared to the people he believes he
| communicating down to.
|
| "The actual critiques are personalized to the content and, to
| one extent or another, valid, but the social purpose of the
| critiques is universal which is that I felt uncomfortable
| that reading this might mean I have to re-evaluate my
| worldview and I'm going to dive into the comment section and
| upvote all the people telling me actually, I don't have to do
| that."
| barrkel wrote:
| Personalized to doesn't mean focused on; it means
| subjective and relative to the critic.
|
| The "social purpose of the critiques is universal" is
| saying that, in opposition to the disparate and varied,
| _personalized_ , nature of the specific critiques, their
| social purpose is all the same.
|
| This universal purpose is saying "I felt uncomfortable ...
| might have to re-evaluate world view ... I'll upvote all
| the detractors".
|
| > _elevated personal impression of erudition_
|
| This is ironic, I have to say.
|
| Anyhow, I found it easy to read the comment. It does flow a
| bit like stream of consciousness, but it's comprehensible,
| probably in part because I agree with a good amount of it.
| You shouldn't expect polished prose in comment forums on
| the interwebs.
|
| If you felt that it talked down to _you_ (personalized),
| then perhaps evaluate the social purpose of your own
| comment (did you feel uncomfortable? I got the impression
| you did).
| TeaBrain wrote:
| Why "personalized to" doesn't work is because that line
| is referencing the text, not the author. If he would have
| preferred to have used "personalized to" he could have
| done so, as long as the subject in that line was changed
| to the author. Your interpretation of the universal
| social purpose line is creative and more intelligible
| than the referenced comment, but whatever the intended
| meaning may have been, it was not immediately clear.
|
| As to your second to last comment, I wouldn't have even
| mentioned it had the other commenter not mentioned how
| they found the prose jarring. To your question in your
| final line, I didn't say that I felt I was being talked
| down to, I said that the author seemed like he thought he
| was talking down to an audience below him, such as with
| his line where he mentions his startup friends whom he
| shared his text with, but wouldn't share the same with
| HN.
| barrkel wrote:
| Read the second paragraph as if it's paraphrasing the people
| he's pointing at in the first paragraph.
|
| I found it quite clear. But then I agreed with it.
| xwolfi wrote:
| You are wrong to think public debates are here to reach an
| understanding between the debaters. Whining that nobody submits
| to you in a fight is ridiculous: fight, show us your genius,
| and don't come crying to mommy if we fight back.
|
| Your goal is to convince the audience, not your opponents.
| pasquinelli wrote:
| nobody's actually paying attention, so your goal is really to
| fight with people online because that's what it takes to get
| your blood pumping.
| bwy wrote:
| I wonder how many of those "sour grapes" commenters have
| actually read the thing-my guess, not many.
|
| Then on the first page of the "silly little book," where I
| already have the question: "why should I read this? Why would
| an employee spend time reading this?" Immediately he addresses
| that: "if you read this book and pass a quiz I'll give you
| $1,000." And if you've seen MrBeast videos, it's not
| inconceivable that everyone who's read the manual has actually
| received $1,000.
|
| Corporate leaders would do well to learn from just this. What
| are you saying in the all-hands meeting that takes 1,000 SWE-
| hours that's actually worth that much? What value does your
| employee handbook/documentation provide (in my experience, a
| lot of documentation provides _negative_ value by virtue of
| being so out-of-date, confusing, or just wrong).
|
| Jimmy has probably done the math (in a intuitive sense; I don't
| think he has strong math skills), and it's worth the employee-
| hours for him to pay them $1,000 to read this PDF to avoid
| having them waste time or make mistakes they've already made.
| It's probably worth a lot more than $1,000.
| Timber-6539 wrote:
| Basically treats his own employees like his subscribers.
| "Stay tuned for the $1000 giveaway!". Have you never watched
| any of Mr Beast's videos?
|
| The fact that you made it to his company is _enough_
| incentive for you to go through the onboarding document.
| matthewowen wrote:
| IME people are actually quite bad at thoroughly reading and
| absorbing onboarding material. Adding incentives so that
| they actually do it is probably pretty valuable.
| qwertytyyuu wrote:
| Heck I'm not a subscriber to him and I read the whole
| document
| jdgoesmarching wrote:
| If you think this is some genius business advice, find the
| nearest 20 year old marketing major on stimulants and your
| mind will be blown.
|
| Props to this guy for producing popular content and piecing
| together some management concepts, but this is so far from
| anything corporate leaders "need" to read.
| matthewowen wrote:
| I think there's at least some of the cliched HN behavior of
| "I read the title and used it as a prompt to write about my
| opinions on one of the nouns it contained".
|
| I don't really care for Mr Beast (but don't think about him
| much either) and I don't think this is especially revelatory
| stuff, but I think most of it is pretty sound advice for how
| to be effective.
| Pannoniae wrote:
| I'd personally love to hear your views and thoughts. Either
| about this subject or in general. You seem very thoughtful and
| self-aware, which is always a positive thing. Don't let the
| naysayers get to ya....^^
| analog31 wrote:
| I have a hypothesis, that once a thread has more than N
| comments, a sub-comment under the top comment is more likely to
| stay close to the top of the page, than the same thought
| expressed in its own top comment. And certainly more likely to
| be seen than any new thread.
|
| Or, people are just more likely to see something closer to the
| top, that inspires them to comment.
|
| Therefore, the top comment in a top page thread is itself a
| natural comment magnet.
|
| I don't know of an antidote to this, except that I try not to
| do it myself. And wary of the possibility of a pot-kettle
| situation here.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > I don't know of an antidote to this
|
| Display comments in random order. Then it becomes possible to
| add a top level comment and have it not disappear forever
| into the bottom of the page, forever unseen.
|
| Alternatively, comment as quickly as possible. Ideally, be
| the first person to comment. Just comment your general
| thoughts and then fill in everything you wanted to say over a
| series of edits while simultaneously improving the comment's
| logic, grammar and spelling. This one goes all the way back
| to stackoverflow. It's a habit I have never been able to
| shake to this day because of how active I used to be on that
| site. Probably contributed to my account getting rate limited
| here.
| zulban wrote:
| "and decided I didn't have the energy to face the endless
| onslaught of nitpicks and misunderstandings"
|
| Meh, just write it well and share, then ignore the feedback.
| You should really only listen to feedback from smart people
| that you trust anyway. But I understand your position.
| Dig1t wrote:
| So true man, the best part of this site are the positive and
| thoughtful folks. It's pretty easy to be negative and find
| flaws in things, it's more difficult and constructive to find
| the positive and try to learn.
| lxgr wrote:
| There's positive thoughtfulness, critical thoughtfulness, and
| knee-jerk reactions of both kind as well.
|
| At least personally I appreciate both kinds of thoughtful
| comments, and it's what's keeping me coming back here.
| Equating valid criticism with "negativity" on the other hand
| honestly seems pretty toxic/cultish to me.
| ipv6ipv4 wrote:
| > But also my larger meta-point is that there's a now near
| ubiquitous "sour grapes" attitude that's pervaded HN
|
| I've recently noticed it everywhere. Not just on HN.
| danpalmer wrote:
| I really enjoyed the book "The Smartest Guys in the Room" about
| the Enron scandal for two reasons. The first and more obvious
| was that it was a deeper look into the systemic issues that led
| to the failures, which meant it was less "they did a fraud" and
| more about the way culture evolves at a company to the point
| that they did it.
|
| Perhaps more importantly though, was my takeaway that it mostly
| wasn't fraud, it was truly innovative accounting that with
| hindsight was the wrong idea, but if the world worked out just
| a bit differently, could have led to them winning the market
| and taking the financial world in a new direction. It's not
| obvious to me that the fraud timeline is the only one or even
| the most likely one, we'll never know.
|
| "History is written by the victors" is what comes to mind here.
| Or in another way, it's survivorship bias. I haven't read the
| Mr Beast document yet but I can imagine what's in it because my
| previous company had similar material (although likely far less
| controversial), and I'd bet many commenters here have similar
| culture documents, handbooks, mission statements, and so on,
| which when read out of context or through the lens of a future
| scandal could appear far more incriminating than otherwise.
|
| We need to get better at distilling what it is in material like
| this that is a contributor to the success/failure/scandal, and
| what... just is... doesn't have an impact, or could have been
| another way. We need to be better at actually learning from
| these things in a nuanced way.
| MrVandemar wrote:
| > mostly wasn't fraud, it was truly innovative accounting
| that with hindsight was the wrong idea
|
| When your "innovative accounting" makes you feel, at some
| point, that you should be shredding important documents, I
| think it mostly was actual _fraud_. You know, _criminal_
| behavior.
|
| Let's call it like it is: a bunch of rich, extremely entitled
| people who decided they should, you know, be _more_ rich by
| abusing their privilage and positions, and who helped nobody
| except themselves.
|
| There's nothing admirable there, just another of those
| lessons that we ignore continually: cockroaches wear suits,
| and often expensive ones too.
| danpalmer wrote:
| This is the point of the original comment, you have failed
| to engage in the actual material and have instead just
| concluded a binary position of "bad".
|
| Read the book. I came in thinking "Enron bad" at the
| beginning, but left the opinion I stated above, that they
| did clearly commit fraud, but that it wasn't just a bunch
| of bad people deciding to do fraud one day, that it was a
| slow transformation from things that were obviously legal,
| to things that were obviously illegal, where it's actually
| surprisingly hard to draw a line separating the two.
|
| Mark to market accounting for energy businesses doesn't
| work (in this way at least). We know that _now_ because
| Enron tried it, legally, and it didn 't work, somewhat
| spectacularly.
| MrVandemar wrote:
| > where it's actually surprisingly hard to draw a line
| separating the two.
|
| It's really not that hard. If they _sincerely_ thought
| they were doing something legal they would have sat back
| and waited to be vindicated, not spun up the The Power-
| Shredder 2400(tm) in a panic and started feeding it what,
| for the sake of argument, a court of law might want to
| call "evidence".
|
| That's a line, crossed pretty definitively.
|
| Cockroaches.
| danpalmer wrote:
| Again, you're failing to engage with the comments here in
| exactly the way that the comments were complaining about.
| Your insights are factually incorrect and your comments
| say more about you than they do about Enron.
|
| The Enron scandal took place over nearly a 10 year
| period. The company was weird but likely not illegal for
| probably half that, most of even senior leadership
| appeared to be in the dark about the actual fraud
| (willingly or otherwise) until probably a few years left.
| They only started shredding evidence with weeks left.
| This is a 20k person company, no matter how you slice it
| that many people aren't committing a large conspiracy
| together and to suggest otherwise is ludicrous.
| troad wrote:
| > Perhaps more importantly though, was my takeaway that it
| mostly wasn't fraud, it was truly innovative accounting that
| with hindsight was the wrong idea, but if the world worked
| out just a bit differently, could have led to them winning
| the market and taking the financial world in a new direction.
| It's not obvious to me that the fraud timeline is the only
| one or even the most likely one, we'll never know.
|
| I don't think it's disputable that what Enron was doing, by
| the end, was fraud. 'The Smartest Guys in the Room' got a
| little too caught up in attacking mark-to-market, which
| itself isn't intrinsically fraudulent, but boy can it be
| misused for fraud, and the Enron guys absolutely and
| inarguably used M2M (among many other things) for fraud.
| Wilfully and knowingly.
|
| Life is indeed shades of grey, but don't get so unmoored in
| your relativism that you end up giving cover to people doing
| genuinely bad things.
| danpalmer wrote:
| My read of the book was that at the beginning Enron was
| attempting to use M2M for their "Gas Bank" concept, and at
| that point it wasn't obvious that it was wrong, and it
| wasn't fraud either. We now don't accept M2M accounting for
| what they were using it for, but they were seemingly the
| first (or first to get noticed?) to use it in the way they
| did and if things worked out differently maybe it would
| have stuck. In this way I think it's a bit of a case of
| "history is written by the victor".
|
| By the end they were doing clear and obvious fraud,
| particularly in how they orchestrated the incoming funding
| for projects, and it had become clear that M2M was not
| working, but I don't think this was the only possible
| outcome.
| YZF wrote:
| Nuance is hard and everyone just wants a quick hit.
| Especially in these modern days of zero attention span.
|
| I read the blog post and I found it interesting. It's
| something I will file under "interesting" and over time with
| many other things informs how I think about the topic of
| building successful businesses and teams. It's something I've
| been thinking and doing (more on the teams side, less on the
| business) for a while. It's not something that you just read
| a blog about and then go do what that blog post says. This is
| true of technical topics as well. If life was as easy as just
| do what this other (successful) guy/company does or thinks
| (in whatever discipline or on whatever topic) then we'd all
| be immensely successful at everything. It's true that success
| and failures should feed into building our intuition of what
| works and what doesn't but intuition is built over a lot of
| experiences.
| hattmall wrote:
| That is a pretty interesting and accurate take. There is
| absolutely a ton of new innovative accounting going on still
| today. When / If these companies fail due to market
| conditions some of these accounting practices will most
| certainly be labeled as fraud. The takeaway from the Enron
| tale for the remaining firms wasn't we should stop finding
| new ways to increase revenue and decrease liabilities it was
| that we need to hire more teams to write white papers
| explaining why what we are doing isn't fraud.
| rtpg wrote:
| Well instead of posting what you wrote you posted this
| complaint, which just contributes to this vibe. You have the
| right to vent of course.
|
| If you post something interesting people will read it! Sour
| grapes comments are kinda boring, and complaints about sour
| grape comments are also kinda boring.
|
| If you don't want certain kinds of conversations in a
| community, one of the best things to do is to "crowd that out"
| by just offering positive alternatives, with interesting posts.
|
| I have a lot of social complaints about finance, but still love
| reading about it. Cuz it's interesting in the abstract!
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| What concepts did you feel were new here that aren't beaten to
| death in standard entrepreneur/hustle porn?
| cdchn wrote:
| I tried scouring this document for anything novel or
| insightful and couldn't find anything. Just a lot of spelling
| errors and run on paragraphs.
| the_gorilla wrote:
| I can tell everyone here has something in mind that they're all
| talking about, but don't want to say specifically what it is. I
| definitely agree that if you make any sort of substantial post,
| you're going to get a million low effort replies nitpicking
| small details. If you try to respond to all of them, you'll
| either run out of posts or lose your mind. Most of the time
| people just pick one small detail, post something completely
| incorrect or unrelated, and move onto the next headline post to
| respond to.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| You're not engaging with the linked content either, you just
| picked this thread to pose a general complaint about
| conversations on HN.
|
| Be the change you want to see! Post your thoughts on the Mr
| Beast doc as a reply to your first comment and see how it goes.
| troad wrote:
| > One distressing trend I've noticed becoming ubiquitous on HN
| is that any writing that is confronting to a consensus
| worldview becomes flooded with highly upvoted comments that
| are, in essence, excuses for why it's not necessary in this
| instance to re-examine your priors.
|
| In as far as this is a document that says 'do your best, give
| 110% 25/8, sacrifice everything for the company', most of what
| I'm seeing here is the same general approval that latter-day HN
| gives all impractical advice that a very young person might
| come up with. ('Just do gooderer, all the time!')
|
| I don't think the change is that people now are now closed-
| minded, I think it's more that something like Mr Beast's PDF of
| peppy twenty-something bromides simply wouldn't have made the
| front page at all in 2014. This would be over on Digg with the
| other pop-Internet stories.
|
| More broadly, given that the comment section appears around
| 60-70% positive for Mr Beast, I'm unsure what it is you're
| actually after. Would you prefer it be 100% positive? Wouldn't
| that be a huge loss for the intellectual diversity that this
| site has to offer? Aren't there other, better places for hive
| takes (e.g. Reddit)?
|
| Respectfully, I think the takes you're taking issue with are
| precisely the remnants of the old, diverse HN, and the takes
| you're tacitly encouraging are the monoculture that's taken
| over the rest of the Internet.
| rexpop wrote:
| What I find even more tedious is the viewpoint that imagines
| itself "confronting to a consensus worldview" while echoing
| mainline meritocratic commercialism.
|
| Shades of "What You Can't Say"[0].
|
| 0. https://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
| mrmetanoia wrote:
| I agree. We have to raise our personal standards to raise our
| community standards. The nihilism here is a self fulfilling
| prophecy and sad to see.
| johnfn wrote:
| I think this style of meta commentary is more damaging to any
| discourse than the behavior that you're saying you've
| identified. Looking over the top comments, other than yours, I
| see a good majority of people honestly trying to engage with
| the content. I'm not exactly sure where you're seeing a
| "ubiquitous "sour grapes" attitude", but it seems to me that
| your own post typifies such a description more than the rest of
| the discussion here.
| rsoto2 wrote:
| I would refute this point but my opinion is actually too
| based and even scares me.
| whall6 wrote:
| I'm fairly certain most of the "sour grapes" comments are AI
| generated
| ghiculescu wrote:
| Please share what you wrote, lots of people might value it
| despite all the naysayers.
| h0l0cube wrote:
| > confronting to a consensus worldview
|
| There's a bit of missed irony here that you decrying the 'sour
| grapes' crowd with 'sour grapes' of your own, and yourself have
| been upvoted to the top. I do agree this culture of indulged
| victimhood is really dragging internet discourse down, but you
| surely can see your own complicity in it?
| tptacek wrote:
| I've never seen a Mr. Beast video prior to reading this. I
| thought there was some interesting stuff in it (I have a recent
| professional interest in video stuff, though let me reassure
| everyone I don't plan to show up in any), some standard-issue
| "trying to keep a founding team culture going" stuff, and some
| stuff that read like self-gratification. I didn't write the PDF
| off. It's worth filing away. I'd be interested in your
| takeaways.
|
| I did go watch a couple Mr. Beast videos. I can see why people
| knee-jerk about them here. They are just not my cup of tea, and
| they're not in a way that really rubs me the wrong way. That's
| OK! I can be convinced that's just a "me" thing! It doesn't
| matter; I'm not building too much of "don't like Mr. Beast"
| into my identity.
|
| I take your point, but also get why people might have
| viscerally negative opinions about this particular subject? I
| get the frustration with superficial negativity crowding out
| discussions though.
| weaksauce wrote:
| > I take your point, but also get why people might have
| viscerally negative opinions about this particular subject?
|
| I don't think it's just the fact that his videos are
| expensive click bait where he throws money around... it's the
| fact that he has some very shady, borderline illegal(maybe
| actually illegal?) practices. the livestream marketing the
| chocolate to children to win entries into giveaways that he
| then scrubs from the internet are probably not legal is one
| example. there are a few videos on how scummy he is. I think
| the visceral reaction to him as some kind of genius is
| warranted.
|
| that said the pdf has some nuggets of wisdom even if it's
| from a tainted source.
| YZF wrote:
| I'm sure there are management lessons to be learnt from the
| Mafia ;) There are other tech companies the skirt things
| like regulatory and other borders.
|
| I'm not a fan of Mr. Beast but it's quite a phenomena and
| human nature being something universal I'm sure there are
| some interesting nuggets from how that business is run.
|
| I also don't get or watch reality shows from more
| traditional media.
| totetsu wrote:
| It's just system justification bias
| gmd63 wrote:
| Hating on "nitpicking" is the funniest thing to me. It's a bold
| admission that one has abandoned attention to detail. Huge red
| flag.
| enugu wrote:
| Yes, correction of a detail is good and not a problem. But
| using that to mock the central point is a popular strategy in
| discourse.
|
| In the disagreement
| hierarchy(https://paulgraham.com/disagree.html) this is level
| 4 or 5, but pretending to be level 6. Like using a bug to say
| that the software lacks basic value.
| the_gorilla wrote:
| I wonder if this is meant to be ironic because this behavior
| is exactly what was being criticized. You just picked one
| specific detail to focus on and ignored everything else.
| mydogcanpurr wrote:
| No, a lot of people on this website value very highly their
| completely irrelevant nitpicks. I'm starting to think it's
| just the kind of mind the tech industry attracts, because
| I've noticed it in some coworkers as well.
| gmd63 wrote:
| The anti nitpicking attitude is the core point of the
| parent commenter's post. I agree with sensible
| prioritization as exemplified in the linked article, as
| should everyone. But the author of the comment I'm
| responding to is expressing discomfort with a culture that
| identifies holes in their reasoning. They're so
| uncomfortable with having details of their arguments
| challenged that they aren't saying what they really want to
| say.
|
| I know an "anti nitpicker" who is entirely opposite to that
| attitude when it comes to their social appearance and
| perception. One hair on their tie is catastrophic. One
| publicly searchable webpage that shows a decades old
| picture of them is an extreme problem that warrants hiring
| a company to clean up. It's interesting how, in matters
| that are important to some of these people, seemingly
| inconsequential and irrelevant details suddenly matter to
| an extraordinary degree.
|
| The anti nitpicking stance is a byproduct of the extreme
| overvaluation of social perception. Often these people do
| not like to look like they have made a mistake. And thus
| they avoid conflict or paint it as irrelevant in belief
| that it will save their appearance.
| refurb wrote:
| Really? I see that problem all the time at work.
|
| There is a limited amount of resources (time, people and
| money). If you have a list of 100 things to fix, you better
| figure out which of those 100 are going to drive the biggest
| improvement.
|
| I see teams all the time focused on fixing a problem without
| stopping for a minute to ask "will fixing this actually make
| a difference?".
| sashank_1509 wrote:
| The way I understand this is that now HN commentators are
| filled with what Nietzche would call the "last-men" who have
| "last-men" values while in the past it was not as widespread.
| Another site filled with such people is Reddit, where I stopped
| bothering to comment anymore as it is far more dominated by
| people in this category than HN.
|
| Yes, it is exhausting to read through those comments, more
| exhausting to argue against them. Not sure if it is worth it
| anymore, this is probably not a tide that can be stopped. But
| HN is still one of the few sites that is not wholly dominated
| by last men, and you can find thoughtful comments that broaden
| your perspective occasionally. Enjoy it while it lasts!
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| What a stupid meme. "The last men" is most closely seen in
| that movie Wall-E, with the humans who are on that spaceship.
|
| HNs userbase builds far too much for that. Nietzsche was so
| garbage, he was just buttmad that Philipp Mainlander and
| Schopenhauer were 1. much more correct and 2. more famous
| than he ever was in their own eras.
|
| It's also telling that Nietzsche is the foundation behind all
| of the garbage from the french post-modern
| neomarxist/critical theorist/situational international folks.
| You are the thing you hate.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| In case people aren't aware of the "fraud" accusations
| mentioned in this comment, here's a video:
| https://youtu.be/k5xf40KrK3I
|
| There are many more discussing all that has come out recently
| about that channel.
| rsoto2 wrote:
| He constantly runs illegal lotteries and lies to kids. What is
| so complex and insightful about your understanding of this
| situation that you have to hide it in the group chat? Companies
| like uber and lyft constantly ride the line of illegality and
| that's how they're able to turn profits.
|
| tldr it's not that deep bro, business people are shady and draw
| ire mostly thanks to decades of business people being shady and
| drawing ire.
| langsoul-com wrote:
| Let's not indite just HN here. It's more the world is the same
| and this is just an extension of the internet norms.
|
| Think toxic game forums. They used to be nice and a good place,
| but now? It's a hot mess and everyone who wants proper
| discourse already self selected out.
| RobLach wrote:
| Is this linked pdf an example of something "confronting the
| worldview consensus"? Or the comments here?
|
| Not a rhetorical question; confused.
| golemotron wrote:
| Nietzsche called it 'Ressentiment'
| klik99 wrote:
| I think there's plenty to learn from it, but there's two big
| problems when applying his approach in a more generalized way:
|
| a) The youtube market is not like other markets, his strategy
| is successful because (among many things) the youtube algorithm
| promotes frequent posting. He knows youtube very well, but it's
| clear from his other business ventures that he's not good in
| other markets. I don't think you can translate ALL the stuff
| there into other markets.
|
| b) There's a lot of unhealthy stuff mixed in with the parts
| that seem like they drive his success. If somebody does X, Y
| and Z and gets insane levels of success, they may not realize
| that it's X and Y driving the success, and Z is actively
| harmful. But I guess it depends on what you consider "harmful"
| - some might think "harmful" means "hurts the bottom line" and
| some might think "hurts those lowest on the rung". Either one
| of those might be true. It's like people who think being an
| asshole like early Steve Jobs is the way to be a successful
| leader, when he arguably achieved more lasting impact when he
| mellowed out.
|
| With that context, I think some of the critiques you mention
| have substance.
|
| "He's making low value content" -> I think this is true,
| because he's optimized for the market he's in. I think it's a
| legit critique that this strategies may not be sustainable or
| applicable to "high value content". He even expressly says
| this: "Not the highest quality videos.. It's to make the best
| YOUTUBE videos possible."
|
| "the culture of the company is horrible" -> I absolutely think
| this is worth talking about, and I find it hard to see building
| a long term company on his approach. The myth that you need to
| push people to breaking points to be successful is poison.
|
| "he's a fraud/it's more luck than skill" -> Well anyone saying
| that is just wrong. He obviously is very good at what he does.
|
| Personally, I don't think it's a good long term business
| strategy to depend so much on a single larger company, one who
| has a history of changing the algorithm without warning or
| explanation. But it's a good, but painful, short term strategy,
| and he will come out of it perfectly fine whenever he suddenly
| becomes irrelevant. But there are others who won't/haven't come
| out with much, and I think it's good to have a discussion if
| this is right or not.
|
| But there are good things there, the critical components, the
| importance of communication. The direct feedback of "You are my
| bottleneck" is good, but it easily could turn into passive
| aggression and ways to pass the buck. I'm sure there's plenty
| of low quality comments here, but don't just write off all
| criticism as virtue signalling or whatever. There are def
| lessons in here, but that doesn't mean it's all above
| questioning.
| ta_1138 wrote:
| It's true that having to push people to the breaking point is
| poison. However, there's the other, not poisonous side of the
| coin: Communication costs will kill your productivity, and
| communication degrades far faster than linearly as you add
| people.
|
| So we don't want to break people, but adding one more person
| makes the company worse. So a very successful company is
| probably going to push people very hard, because otherwise
| communication costs eat it alive. I've been in way too many
| companies that got way worse over time, just because the
| headcount increases ruined productivity.
| krick wrote:
| > 750+ words of my takeaways <...> I briefly considered also
| posting to share with the community
|
| I'm not going to beg you to share it after all, but just
| letting you know: if you would, I'd read it.
| grecy wrote:
| Same
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| No one is going to be happy about what I'm about to point out,
| but reap what you sow HN. This is directly and fully as a
| result of 1. the current (terrible) set of rules and 2. Dang
| being a moderator (and this communities unending fawning over
| his moderation)
|
| Fix both of these, and HN would have far fewer issues related
| to what you are describing.
|
| All other explanations of this phenomenon which don't talk
| about the above two are not even close to on point.
| screye wrote:
| Could you elaborate on the takeaways that challenge existing
| priors ?
|
| The points in the OP boil down to:
|
| * Focus on your product
|
| * Hire well
|
| * Be extra diligent towards bottlenecks
|
| * State your metrics clearly
|
| * Communicate often and immediately
|
| ________
|
| These are standard guidelines for running businesses. HN
| commenters are unimpressed because there are no novel
| generalizable takeaways from his document.
|
| For a few years, Adam Sandler was producing low-brow schlock
| that made 100s of millions in the box office. It was effective.
| It's not clear if there was a takeaway
|
| ________
|
| There is 1 takeaway from Mr. Beast that appears generalizable.
|
| Sometimes, for a short duration, you hit gold. During that
| time, obsessively extract all value you can. Merch, videos,
| exploitation, what have you. For a solid minute, you're Midas.
| So touch as many things as you can. Be shameless beyond
| recognition.
|
| Too often, businesses see their hockey-stick moment as a sign
| of long term sustainable growth. That's a lie (in expectation).
| A moment is all it is. Wring out your business for every dollar
| you can extract, liquidate as much as you can, and bail before
| you're past the crest of the wave.
|
| I'm confident that Mr. Beast's Youtube stardom will die in a
| few years. But, he will leave behind a legacy of obsessive
| extraction that is unlikely to be matched for quite some time.
| bsder wrote:
| > He's making low value content/the culture of the company is
| horrible/he's a fraud/it's more luck than skill.
|
| Does this guy know his business? Oh, hell, yes. He clearly
| knows his business _cold_. Success always has a significant
| chunk of luck, but skill is a part of luck, and he clearly
| demonstrates that skill.
|
| However, just because someone really knows their business and
| does well at it does not mean we simply give them a complete
| pass. For example, payday lenders know their business very well
| yet we still consider them to be exploitative and parasitic.
|
| This guy is super-specializing in explicitly targeting pretty
| much mostly teenaged males with purely dopamine hit content
| with very little benefit (if any and possibly a negative
| effect) _to the audience_. He is pushing the video equivalent
| of junk food to an audience with weak, underdeveloped impulse
| control.
|
| This is going to get pushback, and it _absolutely deserves_
| that pushback.
|
| > excuses for why it's not necessary in this instance to re-
| examine your priors.
|
| Which priors should I reexamine? The fact that he is
| effectively targeting adolescent males? The fact that YouTube
| is all consumed with feeding the ad machine and should be
| forced out of Google? The fact that social media has turned out
| to be a pox upon our society?
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| One distressing trend I've noticed becoming ubiquitous on HN
| is that any writing that is confronting to a consensus
| worldview becomes flooded with highly upvoted comments
| that are, in essence, excuses for why it's not
| necessary in this instance to re-examine your priors.
|
| I genuinely do not know what you're trying to say here. For
| funsies, I tossed this into Claude 3.5 Sonnet with the prompt
| "Translate this into 7th grade English" (which is roughly Mr
| Beast's core audience?). Here was its response:
| I've seen something happening more and more on HN that bothers
| me. When someone writes something that goes against
| what most people think, the comments section gets
| filled with popular replies. These replies are
| basically just reasons why you don't need to think
| about changing your mind on this topic.
|
| Assuming this is a reasonable analog to your original point, I
| would say that this definitionally what a mainstream response
| to contrarianism looks like.
| killthebuddha wrote:
| I think it's basically "HN is extremely hostile to
| iconoclastic ideas"
| santoshalper wrote:
| How about even more basic "HN is arrogant."
| nine_k wrote:
| Bonus points for a self-referential comment! :-]
| nmz wrote:
| Reminder to look at the twitter user "shithnsays"
| johnfn wrote:
| I think OP is saying:
|
| * He thinks most people dislike Mr. Beast, his company, and
| think he's popular only due to luck.
|
| * He thinks this document makes good points, but that most
| people won't be able to see them due to what they believe
| about Mr. Beast prior to reading it.
| nine_k wrote:
| Most people find it incredibly annoying when somebody they
| don't like makes a good point. Often they would rather
| reject the good point to avoid agreeing with the despicable
| author if it. They value long-term group identity / loyalty
| higher than any particular good point [1].
|
| For instance, much of the initial research into the harms
| of smoking was done in Germany in Nazi times. While the
| results were largely correct (and later confirmed
| elsewhere), it was much easier for tobacco proponents to
| contest or reject them on the grounds of the Nazi Germany
| origins.
|
| [1]: https://davidsamson.substack.com/p/tribaltheory-002-tr
| ibalis...
| yial wrote:
| I think using the example of Nazi research weakens
| greatly the point you're trying to make.
|
| Considering we used a monumental wealth of nazi research,
| and the existence of operation paper clip.
| https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190723-the-ethics-
| of-us...
|
| Even though you're correct that Nazi rhetoric impacted
| creating permissive tobacco policies.
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2736555/
|
| To clarify, I think it's because it's an extreme example,
| that while technically perhaps accurate, misses that it's
| a hard one for a reader to relate to effectively and
| misses a subtext of: shouldn't any research from that
| source (of which what are the ethics of using it as
| well?) especially in a lens of 1940/1950, be subjected to
| extreme skepticism? Where additional replication may not
| be practical or possible.
| nine_k wrote:
| Exactly, exactly, people feel it very uncomfortable to
| lean on results of Nazi researchers, no matter what
| objective scientific truth this research may have
| uncovered. It's like "objective" and "scientific" wane
| and disappear, because "Nazi" and "truth" are utterly
| incompatible in the post-war Western culture. We're lucky
| Nazi-tainted scientists did not discover something
| fundamental.
|
| Under a more rational angle, any promising results
| obtained by an enemy should be double- and triple-
| reproduced, because an enemy may be planting
| disinformation into it. But this is a bit more serious
| than somebody you don't like making a comment you would
| rather have made yourself, and you already agree with the
| point because you would make it yourself and are now in a
| bind. That's the kind of uncomfortable situation I
| initially referred to.
| nine_k wrote:
| Maybe it's exactly the wide support for irrational but
| mainstream views is what concerns the author. I mean, that's
| what you'd expect from a conversation in a random bar, but
| maybe HN used to be somehow different.
| sanderjd wrote:
| I've been here for awhile, and my take is that HN both now
| and in the past has an unusually high signal to noise
| ratio, which does not mean it has little noise. It's just
| that noise is the default state.
| christianqchung wrote:
| GP's post is also the top voted post, and most of it is
| complaining about downvotes and criticism which don't exist
| yet on his hypothetically valuable summary. If there's
| anything distressing about HN culture, it's this being an
| acceptable comment type period.
| nfw2 wrote:
| Agreed. This sort of posting is against the HN community
| guidelines:
|
| - don't sneer at the rest of the community
|
| - don't comment about the upvoting of comments
|
| - don't say hacker news is turning into Reddit (not
| explicitly the case here, but similar in spirit)
|
| Yeah, some responses will be less thoughtful than others,
| but that's what voting is for.
| kloop wrote:
| They're talking about Bayesian priors. Basically prior
| assumptions about the likelihood of a subject.
|
| It's a common phrase in the ratsphere (and its descendants).
|
| Changing your mind is one outcome, but the implication is
| that it requires a complete reexamining of your worldview, as
| changing the internalized probabilities can have many effects
| on perceived likely outcomes.
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| I also do not understand what you're trying to get at with
| "internalized probabilities" etc. I understand the
| importance of this sort of jargon to the 'ratsphere' and
| all that
| (https://www.reddit.com/r/sgiwhistleblowers/s/nLaIGJbWAI),
| but that doesn't make it any more intelligible to me. I
| guess that isn't the point.
| kloop wrote:
| The goal is to update beliefs in all areas when they
| change in one spot.
|
| As a hypothetical, let's say you believe from prior
| experience that being mugged has a very high probability.
| Let's say 50% because it's easier.
|
| Let's also say your friend points out that you've left
| your home hundreds of times this year and haven't been
| mugged. 50% seems like a ridiculous overestimate.
|
| Reexamining your priors would involve not only changing
| your mind about the chance of being mugged, but changing
| downstream beliefs that might be influenced by that
| belief (such as what public policies you support).
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| What, contrarianism is to conform to HNs cynical attitude,
| and the mainstream response is to criticize that attitude?
| testfrequency wrote:
| I credit HN for being the unofficial hangout for nerd snipers
| daedrdev wrote:
| People on HN need to think about how wrong others can be about
| topics they are knowledgable about, then consider that they
| might be that person in topics they don't know much about
| ajkjk wrote:
| Strongly agree.
| sanderjd wrote:
| I think I've been reading this same kind of critique of HN for
| over 10 years now. And I'm hedging here, I originally wrote
| over 15 years, but realized that my memory of 2009 might not be
| that good. But either way, a long time!
|
| That doesn't mean the criticism is false. But it's always weird
| to me when I see it put forward as a new thing.
| xkcd1963 wrote:
| Stop reading crp on the internet and get back to work,
| "founder"
| fossuser wrote:
| HN comment quality has been degrading for a while, I'm no
| longer that active here because of it (unfortunately). X is a
| better source in most cases now (if you choose well and only
| use the following tab).
| barrkel wrote:
| You are absolutely right that a large % of people, when
| confronted with evidence of the kind of obsessive focus
| required for unusual success, have mental antibodies activated
| which reject the message, to preserve their ego and sense of
| self-worth.
|
| Don't dismiss the entire community because of the loud people
| and their upvoters though. There are other people here, and
| they don't necessarily browse HN at a high enough frequency to
| outvote or outcomment the majority.
|
| (I personally think the document is very good, on-point, and
| great advice for ambitious young people. I'm no longer that
| young any more, and I'm also aware of a different side: when
| you push really hard, you can end up burning out. That's the
| other side of the intensity the document advocates. You can
| burn out. It's the single biggest reason I don't push so hard
| these days.)
| glmbk wrote:
| For the "sour grapes" metaphor to work the grapes need to be
| desired at first.
|
| This isn't the case here. Most people do not want to be rich at
| any cost. I might feel some jealousy about Microsoft or
| wolfram.com, but not about a YouTuber whose massive team
| produces bland addictive videos, especially if YouTube is full
| of good videos if you know where to look.
| infecto wrote:
| I've noticed this a lot too. It happens across multiple topics,
| and if you present a well-thought-out counterpoint or idea, it
| often gets dismissed. As for his content, I don't watch it and
| don't have an opinion on it, but the document itself was
| engaging and well-written. It's unfortunate that the focus has
| shifted entirely to the content he produces.
| emchammer wrote:
| If you write everything as if you must put your name to it, and
| then do put your name to it, your writing becomes stronger, and
| those kind of contrarian-neuroses go away.
|
| This account name is not my real name, but I have thought about
| making an HN account with my real name. Mostly I just try to
| spend less time on HN these days.
| im3w1l wrote:
| Well I spent an entire week writing a 75000 word essay refuting
| his document that I shared with some select heads of state. No
| you can't see it, because of your attitude. Your attitude is
| really very bad. It's bad. Not good.
| greenthrow wrote:
| The amount of bootlicking content in here is ridiculous. Nothing
| in this is special or has much to do with MrBeast's success. In
| fact, it has a lot more to do with damaging the brand which has
| happened recently. Thinking you will find success even remotely
| like MrBeast's by following the contents of this document is
| hilariously naive.
| sweeter wrote:
| I think the authors intention was to pull any positives from this
| document that they could, but it seems almost negligent to not
| even mention the "no doesn't mean no" section of this document.
| As well as the context of the current ongoing gigantic mess,
| where Mr Beast tortured a guy while doing a "I spent X Hours in
| Solitary Confinement" video, and had to scrap it after the
| contestant was harmed.
|
| They refused to shut the lights off for days on end and then
| coerced the contestant to run a literal marathon on a
| treadmill... and then there's the sexual abuse allegations high
| up in his team, hiring a convicted child predator and someone
| else with a long sexual abuse criminal history, among other
| things. I'm not sure I would talk his business practices up
| without directly making some kind of distinction or
| acknowledgement here.
| simonw wrote:
| I didn't try to extract positives, I extracted what I
| personally found most interesting.
|
| I skipped the "no doesn't mean no" section because it felt like
| pure hustle culture to me, not to mention something which
| wouldn't work outside of MrBeast because they can lean so
| heavily on their brand - "find an employee who has a kid who is
| a fan" etc.
|
| I didn't actually spot the relationship between the "no means
| no" section and the sexual abuse scandals (I'm apparently not
| completely up to date on MrBeast scandals) - I caught the bit
| about squid game and though that would be a useful thing to
| highlight to remind people that MrBeast's history isn't without
| its nasty incidents.
| elliotec wrote:
| You didn't spot the relationship with the "no doesn't mean
| no" stuff because as you said in the next sentence, you
| skipped it. Nice one.
| simonw wrote:
| > You didn't spot the relationship with the "no doesn't
| mean no" stuff because as you said in the next sentence,
| you skipped it.
|
| No, it was because I had not read the news about MrBeast
| having a sexual predator on his team. My interpretation of
| the earlier comment here was that this should have been a
| flag that the heading "no doesn't mean no" should have been
| called out.
|
| Without that knowledge of the current predator scandal, I
| don't think I was wrong to skip that section when writing
| up my summary. I read that section and it didn't make my
| "highlights" list for when I wrote about the document.
|
| I'm being defensive here because it sounds like you are
| calling me out for something, but I'm not sure what that
| something is.
| elliotec wrote:
| Fair, it wasn't clear to me that you meant "skipped
| writing about it" - I thought you were just some rando
| that was commenting on something that they skipped over
| reading in the article (which I now understand you
| wrote). Sorry for the misunderstanding!
| nirava wrote:
| _sigh_ skip as in skipping to write about it in the blog
| malthaus wrote:
| you empower your employees with a mindset of "no doesn't mean
| no" and have them get results with pushback on no's. they are
| young kids mostly, don't you think that they will apply the
| same learned mindset the next time a girl tells them no?
| simonw wrote:
| Honestly I think the biggest problem with that section is
| the choice of title. I don't think we would be having this
| conversation if that part of the document was titled "If
| someone says something is impossible, always try to explore
| and see if there are alternatives ways we can get it to
| happen instead".
|
| When a big chunk of your business is about filming
| ludicrous stunts that nobody else on YouTube has been able
| to film it's understandable that this idea would end up in
| your employee handbook.
| gonzo41 wrote:
| Mr best is many things. And one of them is a very good
| project/programme manager. This guide highlights that.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| It's interesting to see the discussion from two different angles
| --there's a lot of support for the type of A/B/C delineation in
| parts of this thread, and some people who decry it in other
| parts.
|
| I was on the set for one of the productions, and I'll just say at
| the time I thought the experience was a one-off for one of the
| bigger productions they've put on. Since reading other people's
| stories, it seems more a case where the pressure to push, push,
| push for the next big video is a ginormous machine that grinds
| people pretty hard.
|
| An early stage startup, with a few employees, pushing to hit some
| milestone, could survive like that a while. But you can only burn
| through so many creative minds driving them at 110% all day like
| that. IMO, you have to find a sustainable burn rate that might be
| too much for some, but isn't going to drive away _everyone_
| desiring normal family / outside work life balance, especially
| 5-10 years into an org's lifetime.
|
| MrBeast (the org) has hundreds of employees and probably 5-10
| major active productions (in pre-prod, prod, and post-prod).
| They've achieved a lot of impressive results, but they also get
| to cut a lot of corners traditional media (Hollywood, TV
| production) can't due to labor laws and unions.
|
| Edit: Not to mention, the 'No does not mean no' section was a bit
| alarming. There are plenty of times when no most certainly means
| no, and you can really damage business and personal relationships
| if you can't figure those out.
| slt2021 wrote:
| MrBeast has given up his life for his youtube channel (he
| writes exactly this in the doc) - and he is looking for other
| people willing to give up theirs for his channel
| sanderjd wrote:
| People should not do that, though. There are better things to
| dedicate lives to.
| slt2021 wrote:
| who are you to dictate what people do with their lives and
| deny them their free will?
| DaoVeles wrote:
| Not who you are responding to but I think it is more a
| case of, long term it might not work out as intended for
| them. They are more than free to pursue this goal with
| all their might, but don't be surprised if in a few years
| they are burnt out and scrambling for the exit.
|
| That said, it might work out, who knows? But at some
| point it looks like gambling with your time and energy
| trying to seek fulfillment. Again, they are free to do
| this, just try not to harm others in the process.
| slt2021 wrote:
| even if it doesnt work, an employee was compensated for
| labor on mutually agreed terms & one comes out with
| valuable experience (and arguably a stronger ability to
| build something better than MrBeast if there is
| misalignment with MrBeast principles/values)
| sanderjd wrote:
| Note that I'm not dictating anything to anyone, simply
| stating my view about what things are or aren't good,
| which I'm certainly entitled to.
| saintradon wrote:
| > There are better things to dedicate lives to.
|
| Then those aren't people Jimmy wants to hire for his
| company. There are hundreds of millions of teenagers on
| this planet that want to stake everything they own to make
| a YouTube channel and reap the rewards - ownership of their
| work, being their own boss, potentially lucrative amounts
| of money, microcelebrity if not greater levels of fame,
| etc. Some will do it, and some won't. Jimmy is very clearly
| talking to those people.
|
| I know because I was one of them, making my first few
| hundred dollars ever from adsense at the age of 14 (till I
| was demonetized a year later and my channel got taken down
| for copyright, but hey, you learn). I've since grown a bit
| a taken that energy and it's helped guide me as I learn to
| make my own startup right now - it's the same adrenaline
| rush and pursuit of the American dream.
| pests wrote:
| It's interesting to me that you did this with YouTube, as
| I did the same when I was 16 (almost 20 years ago now)
| but with AdSense. I earned about $70 (mostly off my
| buddies anime site) which I never collected. Seven years
| later Google sends the money to my state's unclaimed
| fund. Even more years later I finally collect that $70
| check.
|
| Just wanted to share some fond memories.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Yep, I get it. This is all true. What I'm saying is that,
| in my opinion, it's also bad and those people (and
| perhaps you) ought to choose a better path. I recognize
| that many of them won't. There are lots of things I think
| people (including myself!) ought not do, which we still
| do anyway.
| earnesti wrote:
| Or, you can go work there for 1-2 years, learn a lot and
| move on. Maybe to some more relaxed work, or start your own
| venture. It actually sounds like a place where you might
| learn something.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Yep, to the extent that this is a sensible thing to do,
| this is the sensible way to do it. This is clearly
| analogous to working in high-pressure finance shops or in
| startups for a fairly short period of time in order to
| drink from a firehose.
|
| The problem is that the kind of people who are ambitious
| enough to think this sounds like a good idea often (maybe
| usually) get sucked deeply into it.
|
| But yep, I do think it's a reasonable model if you can
| avoid that outcome and get in and out early in your
| career.
| TrapLord_Rhodo wrote:
| >There are better things to dedicate lives to.
|
| Everyone seems to think that they have the answers to this
| question... Family, friends, community, god, volunteering
| at the local soup kitchen..
|
| All over your own wants? If you are a video creator/
| creative and that's what gives you energy and all the feel
| good chems, why not work your ASS off for THE CREATOR of
| our generation?
|
| Cause from the way i see it, success and the confidence* it
| brings, solves all other issues.
|
| *As long as you can avoid the pitfall of arrogance.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Because, in my opinion, this is a worse thing to do with
| your life than the many better options.
|
| I don't have some One Right Answer to what the best thing
| to do with your life is, but I'm comfortable having a
| personal - but strong - opinion on a rough ordering that,
| for instance, puts family and friends much higher than a
| life dedicated to "THE CREATOR of our generation". Maybe
| you think that sounds impressive? I think it just sounds
| very sad.
| AndyMcConachie wrote:
| This is what we call a cult.
| valval wrote:
| You can call it whatever you want, it's obvious you're
| never going to be part of it.
| malthaus wrote:
| the audacity to ask other people to give up their life for
| helping you fulfil your dream and even sell it to them as
| them fulfilling their dream.
|
| is it the same "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" shtick
| the american dream brainwashed americans with?
|
| if you have that much drive and want to invest so heavily in
| work - do yourself a favour and do it as a leader where you
| call the shots and have the equity instead of as a follower.
| TrapLord_Rhodo wrote:
| THIS. I would like to tell you a bit of a personal story
| and this may shed some light on your question. Disclaimer*
| I am American.
|
| I was working at Tesla on the CapEx team, and unless you
| were doing something "interesting", like going to Tahoe or
| something, then you were expected to be in the office on
| Saturday and Sunday.
|
| I worked my ass off, pulling 70 hour weeks, catching naps
| in a conference room when there was a big push. I learned
| to be energized by my work, seeing the factory cells come
| together gave me this giant rush. Eventually, I got the
| thought you had but i worded it differently. "I will never
| be Elon, working for Elon".
|
| So when Covid hit, i got put fully remote and started
| having some conversations with potential clients to launch
| my own consultancy. After a couple of months, our managers
| told us to start coming back into office. I had gotten some
| traction with the consultancy, so i decideded to "do
| [myself] a favour and do it as a leader where [i] call[ed]
| the shots and have the equity instead of as a follower."
|
| At first it was great! I was learning an absolute ton,
| designed my own website from scratch, wrote a bunch of
| automation code, my sales ration was like 85% because i was
| just calling on all my old associates and references of
| references... life was great!
|
| Then after i scaled, I realized I wasn't actually doing
| anything... I have these meetings, and my schedule is
| always swamped with evaluating this peice of software/this
| person, generating "Work" for different people, and i
| freaking hated it! I stopped learning... I had no peers,
| only employees. I had "Mentors" but my consultancy was so
| nitch so outside "Executive mentorship" i had no one to
| guide me. I tried to focus on growth opportunities within
| the company, scaling different verticles as different
| companies and other things to keep my mind working, but i
| slowly but surely lost interest. I couldn't push myself 70
| hours a week because i didn't have anyone pushing me, and i
| hated "Consulting".
|
| but every chance i got i would be watching drone videos
| over the Giga Texas progress. I kept up with every SpaceX,
| Tesla update ever...
|
| And suddenly i realised, i deeply missed working at
| Tesla... i don't want to be Elon...
|
| But that Elon is building some pretty cool shit, and
| factories, robots, automation is super cool and fun.
|
| So i sold my consultancy for 1.5X revenues (Pretty shit
| deal but i wanted out). It didn't give me fuck you money
| but i could have chilled for a bit...
|
| but now I'm happily working my ass off back at Tesla,
| fulfilling Elons dream. But i get to "Give up my life" to
| get to play with robots all day. I'm learning a ton again,
| i love my team, and i've never met a smarter group of
| people.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Very interesting personal experience, thanks!
|
| I agree that doing meaningless work is soul crushing even
| if well-compensated.
|
| It seems like it ought to be possible to do meaningful
| work without working 80 hour weeks, but maybe not!
|
| And owning your own business isn't _necessarily_ an easy
| 40 hours a week and don 't think about it when you're not
| working, but sounds like you did have a lighter schedule?
| Or actually you didn't mention that! If you traded a
| 70-hour week as a well-compensated employee doing
| meaningful work for a 70-hour week being your own boss
| with _possibility_ of making more money doing meaningless
| work -- yeah, I would make the same choice between those
| two! But I 'd rather not have a 70 hour week, be
| reasonably compensated, and do meaningful work, if that
| were an option...
|
| But we kind of forgot what we're talking about here...
| pretty sure nobody working for Mr Beast thinks it's
| meaningful work, and if they do, I'm worried about them.
| earnesti wrote:
| He is fricking 26 years old. He hasn't given his life for
| anything. At the moment he is, yes, but likely after some
| years he is retired on his yacht.
| _zamorano_ wrote:
| Some things leave a permanent mark on you. Try being a
| workaholic a few years and tell me later how easy is to
| disconnect, and rejoin with familiy and friends.
| FrankoDelMar wrote:
| Yeah, working constantly for a few years leaves permanent
| marks. You know what makes it better in ways we'll never
| have? Millions of dollars, luxury yachts, and fame. Mr.
| Beast isn't a doctor. He isn't a teacher. He doesn't
| fight our wars. He makes entertainment for children.
| He'll be fine.
| OJFord wrote:
| That's like me saying I've given up my life to have the job
| that I have currently and live where I do. Or you've given up
| your life for however you spend it.
|
| It just about makes some sort of sense in the context of
| something like giving up a professional career in a developed
| country and moving to a remote African village to do aid
| work, but giving up your life to make a tonne of money
| creating viral YouTube videos is an absurd description.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Giving up your life for many millions of dollar is a choice.
|
| His employees are probably payed well, but obviously don't
| make as much as he. So I guess asking them to give up their
| lives for less compensation is to say their lives are or less
| value...
| pests wrote:
| One thing I find interesting over the last few weeks since this
| was released (and other MrBeast drama) is how there is now a
| separation between MrBeast the person and MrBeast the company.
|
| Before today, it was never differentiated. Since the drama
| started, I've seen more news and people (like yourself) clarify
| that you mean the company vs the person, and I'm not sure its
| warranted.
|
| While everything was going good, MrBeast the person took all
| credit for MrBeast the company. Now, it seems like everyone is
| on tip-toes to clarify they are trash-talking MrBeast the
| company, not MrBeast the person.
|
| It just seems a bit weird to me.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Honestly I never met Jimmy even though I was in his studio
| for two weeks working on the video. I did meet a ton of his
| employees, many of whom I'd gladly work with again, just not
| on a MrBeast production.
|
| I just can't speak to Jimmy Donaldson himself. Not even sure
| how much he's involved in the day to day at the company
| (outside of being the public face).
| saghm wrote:
| > While everything was going good, MrBeast the person took
| all credit for MrBeast the company. Now, it seems like
| everyone is on tip-toes to clarify they are trash-talking
| MrBeast the company, not MrBeast the person.
|
| Yeah, I can't really understand why someone would craft a
| persona with a unique bespoke name and then name the company
| the same thing other than to try to make sure that the
| company is viewed as synonymous with the persona.
| gonzo41 wrote:
| The no doesn't mean no section was about contractors and
| dealing with other people. It was a way of conveying that if
| you ask for something and get an outright refusal, then it's ok
| to ask again and pivot on details to try and find a fit.
| MrBeasts company drove a train into a big pit (one of the few
| videos I watched). That call, would have started with, I'd like
| to buy a train and a big pit. It probably started as a flat out
| refusal before he turned up with money.
| valval wrote:
| I bet the folks at Train & Pit Co. Couldn't believe their
| ears.
| yard2010 wrote:
| You don't understand. In this culture if you have enough money
| no does not mean no. You have less laws to care about. In some
| cases you ARE the law.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| My biggest critizism of A/B/C is it is always either a
| delusion, lie, or manipulation. People that talk frequently
| about "A players/employees" are almost certainly not the ones
| hiring them. Why? "A players" don't work someplace where they
| are not respected and ground to dust as a non-owner. That means
| at best the best employees are "B-players" and probably most of
| their staff is actually "C-players"
|
| "A players" know their worth and go somewhere that either has
| prestige, high pay or work life balance and respect. Like all
| such places in my experience Mrbeast does not appear to provide
| those things to all but his inner circle. Which by the way an
| "Inner circle" is a hallmark of places that like to make noise
| about A/B/C dynamics.
| lukas099 wrote:
| I would like to believe that's true, but honestly, I know
| some really hard workers who are gluttons for abuse.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| Sure. My point really was though that if you find a place
| that is openly discussing A/B/C dynamics it is a huge red
| flag.
| next_xibalba wrote:
| > labor laws and unions
|
| Perhaps this is as much a commentary on the state of labor laws
| and unions as anything else.
| cynicalpeace wrote:
| Great article. Its lesson is basically: go 110% in everything you
| do. Buck conventional laziness even when everyone else is doing
| it and be the ultimate "try-hard"
|
| Not to detract from it in any way.
| veunes wrote:
| I think successful anything it is "go 110% in everything you
| do".
| Havoc wrote:
| Questionable as his techniques and friends may be, hard to argue
| with the results
| kumarvvr wrote:
| Imagine the countless millions of hours people, especially young
| ones, have wasted on this content.
|
| Sure, the argument may go, its entertainment and those would have
| gotten the same from alternative sources, but in this particular
| case, viral ready addictive video content is ultimately a bane
| for society.
|
| This guy has studied 20000 to 30000 of videos, done data analysis
| on them, and then finetuned his videos to make them popular and
| earn a lot of money on it. As a business, this is genius, he is
| talented, he is profitable, his investors are circling around
| banks. But society has suffered for it.
|
| My kid watches similar pointless videos, and he is on the verge
| of addiction (any and all free time he has, he jumps to the
| videos of colorful activity videos on you tube, from chinese or
| russian channels. He is 10 years old)
|
| I am weaning him off youtube altogether, and involving him in
| books and other activities, but it is damn hard.
| tkgally wrote:
| It might be interesting to contrast MrBeast's management approach
| with that of Marques Brownlee (MKBHD). He is also a successful
| YouTuber who leads a team that puts out videos on several
| channels. While his videos don't have the huge production scale
| of MrBeast's, they seem to be produced on short deadlines and
| must require close coordination among his team.
|
| If I were young and wanted to work in online media production, I
| would much rather work for Marques Brownlee than for MrBeast.
| rs_rs_rs_rs_rs wrote:
| MKBHD is not even in Top 500 of the most subscribed Youtube
| channels, first give me the details of what those other 500
| channels are doing then maybe MKBHD... (and I'm saying this as
| a long time subscriber)
| Etheryte wrote:
| Would you say the same about companies, that the only
| interesting ones worth talking about are the ones in the
| Fortune 500? If anything, I would say many of them are rather
| boring examples, we all know roughly how they're managed and
| run.
| infecto wrote:
| That's a bit naive. I'm willing to bet that most of them
| have interesting details, with each one doing things in
| their own unique way.
| tinco wrote:
| MKBHD intentionally has a small team that makes relatively low
| budget videos. I think MKBHD mainly has a relatively large
| audience because he was very early to the high quality videos
| game on YouTube. I wouldn't be surprised if his edge is lost
| now and his viewership does not grow faster than would be
| expected of an active channel of his size.
|
| Not to hate on him, but just saying that's in sharp contrast
| with what MrBeast and LTT are trying to achieve.
| jerrygoyal wrote:
| despite less views, MKBHD is more net positive for humanity
| than MrBeast. MrBeast's whole game is to draw people's
| attention to not-so-useful content.
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| Watching a review on a device you'll never buy is hardly a
| net positive compared to watching a yacht get blown up.
| aae42 wrote:
| Not so sure, while I like Marques, he has a 100% focus on
| consumerism.
| snapcaster wrote:
| Come on, they're both useless consumerist slop (i watch a lot
| of slop not throwing stones just don't see either as
| beneficial at all)
| dogleash wrote:
| Is product fetishism really better than light entertainment?
| The MKBHD slop is just branded with that same vibe of the
| products he likes to cover, namely the self-satisfactions of
| luxury goods that people mistake for high quality. That gives
| the false signal it provides more value than Mr. Beast. Yes,
| MKBHD technically covers products, but so did Top Gear. The
| content is neither necessary nor sufficient to make an
| informed purchase decision.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| MKBHD feeds the worst aspects of consumer culture.
| soniman wrote:
| Brownlee is such a mystery to me. The #1 rule of Youtube is
| show energy, show enthusiasm. Brownlee is like if Urkel were
| given a sedative and told to review the latest iPhone
| replwoacause wrote:
| He's been doing it a long time, has an excellent
| understanding of the tech industry, and is a master at
| producing content that is easy for everyone to digest. I've
| been watching him for years and have always thought he had a
| knack for his craft. Just because he has a calm demeanor
| shouldn't take away from what he does, but in my opinion
| should add to it even more.
| igornadj wrote:
| The #1 rule is clearly not show energy, show enthusiasm. It's
| the #1 rule for a subset of content, like MrBeast. The
| content world is a big place, and the silent majority has no
| interest in loud and obnoxious.
| tsol wrote:
| Right. Take Asianometry-- a channel dedicated to economics,
| politics, and tech in Asia. Very high quality stuff. He
| goes into deep detail about a lot of technical stuff.. and
| as you can imagine his delivery isn't anything like a
| showman. He can be monotonous but if anything that is
| likely preferred by his audience, given his niche.
| natdempk wrote:
| You mean he talks more like a normal person talking about a
| product rather than a Youtuber going over the top with
| everything? The fact that he is genuine is a big part of his
| appeal.
| lazzlazzlazz wrote:
| I thought this was a fantastic read and I'm sad to see how far HN
| has sunk. Truly a culture in decline.
| alt227 wrote:
| why?
| CaptainFever wrote:
| Comments here are more about ranting about their negative
| opinions on Mr Beast and YouTube, instead of actually
| analysing this extremely interesting document and seeing what
| we can learn from it.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| I'm telling you, nobody getting rich from this leak.
| gleventhal wrote:
| I don't have the energy for an intellectual debate, but
| personally, I have the sense that Youtube is net bad for the
| world and the monetization of Youtube has incentivized and
| amplified mediocrity, stupidity, and social decay.
|
| I don't follow or watch Mr Beast videos, but from what I've seen,
| they are largely driven by a money fetish and as far as
| "creativity", it feels on par with the more boring "What would
| you rather" conversations I had in middle school.
|
| Maybe he has unlocked the key to virality by vigorously analyzing
| data, but looking at his videos, at a glance, it seems to more be
| formulaic, predictable, and simply having an actual budget that
| sets it apart (if it is actually set apart, as I find it hard to
| tell how much of it is others copying his work versus hius work
| being unoriginal).
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| For as much slop as gets produced on YouTube, I think the high
| quality educational content more than makes up for it. You can
| literally look up any subject and find a full blown series on
| the topic.
|
| His huge budgets and willingness to reinvest all the profits
| into future videos have allowed MrBeast to produce a lot of
| unique videos which are effectively unmatched by anyone else.
| Right now they're really the undisputed kings of the platform,
| by a massive margin.
| Andrex wrote:
| Agreed, YouTube is the PBS of the internet. It's free and
| fast.
| intalentive wrote:
| It's a wonder of the modern world
| cnity wrote:
| This is why those who can appropriately select good
| information will flourish in this age. I still suck at it
| (get pulled into mindnumbing shorts for 30 minutes), but then
| I learned a new musical instrument for _free_ using YouTube.
| aantix wrote:
| >Youtube is net bad for the world
|
| Disagree. The outliers don't determine the value of the
| platform.
|
| The videos of people creating, fixing, coding, diagnosing,
| doing every day random things - those are a gift to humanity.
|
| Those visual demonstrations transcend language. Because of
| this, YouTube is more important than Google or any written word
| website.
|
| Knowledge share is finally global.
| elliotec wrote:
| This is not how YouTube, or people, or virality work though.
|
| The fact there is some useful educational content is a
| byproduct of the machine of lucrative trash of the capitalist
| hellhole spiral, and the written word will always prevail
| comparatively. You can always bet on text.
| https://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/193447.html
|
| Also, as you likely know, YouTube is owned by Google so it's
| very silly to say it's "more important."
| scrollaway wrote:
| What you're saying is that the high quality educational
| content is subsidized by the trash.
|
| It doesn't make it net-bad. It makes it an ad-supported
| educational resource. Is that surprising, given that it's
| owned by an ad company?
| p_j_w wrote:
| > Disagree. The outliers don't determine the value of the
| platform.
|
| Agreed.
|
| > The videos of people creating, fixing, coding, diagnosing,
| doing every day random things - those are a gift to humanity.
|
| These seem like the outliers.
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| The good news is they don't have to be outliers _for you_.
| Watch what you want; skip the rest.
| rurp wrote:
| Mr Beast and similar viral videos are hardly the outliers
| given that their traffic absolutely dwarfs the best
| educational videos. There is a lot of useful and interesting
| content on Youtube, but that's very much a niche use. The
| vast majority of watched hours are on content much closer to
| Mr Beast than learning how to code or a diy woodworking
| project.
| aantix wrote:
| The value isn't determined by watched hours.
|
| No other streaming platform offers a video catalog that
| covers nearly all aspects of human activities.
|
| This has never existed in all of humanity.
| brigadier132 wrote:
| This type of criticism reads to me as a general hatred of what
| humanity actually is. Mr Beast exists because humans like to
| watch it. By blaming Mr Beast, you are putting the effect
| before the cause. There is no enlightened society that is
| _only_ watching MIT linear algebra lectures for fun, it doesn
| 't exist.
| omnicognate wrote:
| Are you arguing that the public fascination with it makes it
| morally acceptable? If so would you consider gladiatorial
| fights to the death and gruesome public executions, both of
| which have been massive crowd-pleasers in the past and no
| doubt would be again if they became socially accepted,
| justified by the same argument? If not, what do you think is
| different here that makes condemning Mr. Beast for feeding
| unwholesome public appetites wrong, but condemning Roman
| emperors for it right? Just a question of the degree of
| nastiness?
|
| Personally, I think human behaviour is massively influenced
| by culture and that we have an individual moral
| responsibility to take actions that work in favour of having
| a healthy culture. And I see that individual moral
| responsibility as resting particularly on those who profit
| from culturally influential activities (and if Mr. Beast
| isn't "culturally influential", please can we retire the term
| "influencer"). I see arguments often made that amount to
| justifying amoral, or even actively immoral, behaviours by
| the fact that money can be made from them, with an implicit
| assumption that humans have no free will when it comes to
| money, that an action that makes money _has_ to be carried
| out and that this somehow morally absolves the one who does
| it. I see that as a corrosive meme and evidence of a deeply
| unhealthy culture, not as a conclusion that follows from
| adopting capitalism as the primary organising principle in a
| society.
| brigadier132 wrote:
| > Just a question of the degree of nastiness?
|
| Just a question of degree of nastiness? Yes, competitions
| involving life and death are qualitatively different from
| competitions involving money. Something interesting to
| think about is that we do have ultra graphic action movies
| and horror movies. Are those also net negative?
|
| > Personally, I think human behaviour is massively
| influenced by culture and that we have an individual moral
| responsibility to take actions that work in favour of
| having a healthy culture.
|
| There is no human culture that I know of that was not
| fascinated by things like money and fame.
|
| > I see arguments often made that amount to justifying
| amoral, or even actively immoral
|
| I don't think Mr Beast is immoral and not for the reasons
| you state. I think you have in your mind some very
| judgemental ideas of what is right and wrong.
|
| I think shows like Mr Beast and all celebrity culture is
| dumb. I think sports are dumb too. I don't think they are
| evil and I know that humanity will find a way to create
| variants of these things no matter what kind of insane
| rules society tried to put in place.
| kubanczyk wrote:
| > This type of criticism reads to me as a general hatred of
| what humanity actually is.
|
| No, that's really shallow. "Humanity" is a perennial
| struggle. If I'd be looking for a word for the lowest common
| denominator it would be "beastliness", to stay on topic of
| the thread.
|
| That criticism reads to me as a general hatred of what
| beastliness actually is.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| Human nature is full of self-conflict and contradiction.
| There are more base aspects of it and higher ones as well.
| This has been known up and down the ages. Vices and virtues.
| "You're against vice, hence you're against humans because
| vice is what humans like to choose!" Well, no. You can be
| against catering to the base urges. You wouldn't feed your
| dog 10 cakes even if it continues eating it. And that's not
| hatred of dog-ity.
| seydor wrote:
| Does youtube have a lot of trash? He s certainly a (very big)
| outlier but the other trashy content is mostly about expensive
| cars and shit which is harmless by comparison.
|
| This guy has a genuine love of torturing people
| lnsru wrote:
| I am with you. YouTube does not offer math lectures about
| volume calculation. It advertises some fast food alike junk
| about insane things. And the 8 years old boys watch cartoons
| about chopped heads and how the dog plays with these heads.
| Afterwards I was happy, that I am luddite and YouTube is
| blocked at home and kids don't have smartphones.
| bmoxb wrote:
| It absolutely does offer more maths lectures than you could
| ever conceivably watch.
| twixfel wrote:
| Yes, but good luck trying to watch them when the thumbnails
| in the side bar are full of seductive junk.
| nicklaf wrote:
| Browser extension solution to that problem:
| https://github.com/lawrencehook/remove-youtube-
| suggestions
| lnsru wrote:
| They're there. Hidden somewhere. I watched some of them.
| But you need to search for them. Like there is quality food
| I prepared for my workday today. But I must actively work
| on that and not take offered junk food.
| gosub100 wrote:
| >But you need to search for them
|
| Oh the horror
| wholinator2 wrote:
| Youtube is the single most important and valuable learning
| tool that exists on the planet. There are lectures on
| literally everything, i have been recently learning my way
| into geometric algebra and lie theory for my physics phd.
| Sure, there's a lot of crap and youtube is just as happy to
| waste your time but if you search out and only watch
| educational content, your Frontpage will become educational
| content. It's hard to keep that way because there's tons of
| fun but uneducational things to watch, but there's browser
| extensions and things to help with that. Extensions that
| block the homepage and video recommendations, extensions that
| let you group your subscriptions and create your own feed. It
| can be amazing if you use it right, it's hard to use right
| sometimes
| bonoboTP wrote:
| More and more it's crystallizing that people with high
| agency can elevate themselves as never before, while the
| average person is dragged down into a mud as never before.
| The divide is crazy and it's starting already in early
| childhood.
|
| Yes, you and people like you can seek out the best browser
| extensions, install them, understand how to use them, and
| can curate a nicely tended online garden for yourself, and
| this is genuinely great. But "we live in a society", even
| you are subject to wider trends of how people around you
| live their lives and spend their time. And average people's
| front page is filled with slop and AI generated chum and
| Youtube-face thumbnails etc. While you can configure ublock
| origin to remove irrelevant recommendations from the middle
| of search results, the average person browses the internet
| without adblock and sinks hours into mindlessly scrolling
| social media.
|
| Our parents worried about us staring at the TV all day, and
| today we have that on super steroids.
|
| It's super hard to avoid rabbit holes. Once the recommender
| engine picks up on something you find interesting it will
| exploit that with no end.
|
| The mind numbing stuff can be highly specific that no human
| TV program manager would ever think up. For example, I
| clicked a few videos about cow and horse hoof trimming and
| horseshoe applications. Kinda interesting, geeking out on
| skilled crafts like this, never seen it done in real life,
| maybe I learn something interesting! And a few days later I
| find myself regularly clicking these because I get so many
| of these now on my frontpage and I kind of take a step back
| and think, is this really time well spent? Watching hoof
| after hoof being trimmed? (By the way, these videos have
| millions of views each, and have entire channels dedicated
| to producing them over and over again. It's an entire
| _genre_ , not just a few videos.)
|
| I see this stuff with family members too. Zoning out and
| watching repetitive crap, like the hydraulic press channel,
| red hot ball, a guy who cleans up backyards, powerwashing
| objects, dashcam crashes, arrest bodycam footage, pimple
| popping, mukbang. (And I'm not even getting into political
| outrage stuff, that's a topic to itself.) Once Youtube
| figures out which type of repetitive brain-numbing genre
| you respond to, it will push it. It takes more self-
| awareness to get back in control than a lot of people have.
| Some of these "genres" are shockingly weird, like jigger
| removal (a kind of larva) from dog paws. I don't know if
| this has been studied properly. It's kind of like a non-
| sexual version of fetishes. Highly specific and somehow
| repetitively able to "tickle" one's brain, and while it's
| soothing and satisfying to some, it's disgusting and weird
| to others, pretty much like sexual fetishes.
| jimmyjazz14 wrote:
| "YouTube does not offer math lectures about volume
| calculation."
|
| oh really did you try searching because I found one in about
| two seconds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1qXIkr05tk
| bit_4l wrote:
| I would disagree on the net bad for the world, or at least be
| skeptical about it. Personally, Youtube was my life changing
| tool which I used to learn almost everything essential to my
| career and personal development, and I would assume lots of
| others would be the same. The type of content it recommends
| goes with the type of content you interacted with in the past.
| It just a tool and it matters how you use it
| malthaus wrote:
| youtube still has a net positive value. the amount of knowledge
| & learning (and ok, entertainment) i get out of it on a daily
| basis is immense and i can't imagine the amount of wisdom i'd
| have sucked up as a kid if i had access to all this.
|
| if it comes at the price of having it subsidised by the likes
| of mrbeast, i'm all for it. same trade-off as getting ads on
| instagram to enjoy it as a free service.
| sgu999 wrote:
| What the algorithm seems to favour is a better indicator of
| what people use Youtube for overall.
|
| I'm also using youtube almost exclusively as a means of
| education, but a net positive for us doesn't really mean
| much. If for one more educated viewer you get ten more
| radicalised and dumber ones, we may be better off without it.
| lijok wrote:
| > I have the sense that Youtube is net bad for the world
|
| Overwhelming majority of things designed to exploit human
| imperfections for personal gain are a net bad. Youtube has
| become one of those things.
|
| Unfortunate, 'cause that's where the money is.
| infecto wrote:
| I see it differently. I don't think YouTube fundamentally
| changes people; it might serve up low-quality content to those
| seeking it, but they'd likely find it elsewhere if not on
| YouTube.
|
| On the positive side, YouTube has brought the world closer. We
| can access videos from nearly every corner of the globe, giving
| us insight into how others live and interact in their
| environments. Additionally, it's become an incredible resource
| for information. If something breaks in my home, I can probably
| find a video explaining how to fix that exact model. While I'm
| not old enough to have "adulted" without YouTube, it's amazing
| how much you can learn from it.
| latentcall wrote:
| Yes agreed. Another commenter said YT is the most valuable
| educational tool in existence today. I think the real answer is
| a library.
|
| YouTube is 99% junk and just because 1% of it is decent, that
| doesn't make up for the 99%.
| codedokode wrote:
| Maybe but YT recommendations are good enough so that you
| don't see those 99% you are not interested in.
| azemetre wrote:
| Trusting an algorithm that wants you to watch the next
| video for ad impressions may not be the unbiased metric you
| think it is.
| meowface wrote:
| There are plenty of terrible books and trash novels. Easily
| 99% of books are junk (often junk dressed up as non-junk). I
| think it's very possible that in 2024, YouTube is net more
| educational than reading. (Speaking in terms of total amount
| of knowledge acquisition.)
| quest88 wrote:
| So, you always go to the library for every problem you have
| where you need a detailed guide?
| asah wrote:
| there's lots of ways to succeed on youtube and in this world.
| MrBeast is only one form.
|
| As one of many examples, the ww2 channel is quite different but
| also financially successful:
| https://www.youtube.com/@WorldWarTwo
| mightybyte wrote:
| > I have the sense that Youtube is net bad for the world and
| the monetization of Youtube has incentivized and amplified
| mediocrity, stupidity, and social decay.
|
| Interesting that you say this regarding YouTube. I've been
| saying this regarding Twitter for awhile even though I consume
| quite a bit of YouTube content. However, I've curated my
| YouTube feed to be almost entirely stuff that is interesting,
| educational, and that I think I'm getting value from. I've
| learned tons of useful stuff from YouTube such as how to dress
| better and tailor my own clothes, how to fix things that break
| around my house, more effective training methods to accomplish
| specific fitness goals...I could go on and on. When I go to
| YouTube in incognito mode, I definitely see the bottom-of-the-
| barrel content that you're talking about. But it doesn't have
| to be that way.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > However, I've curated my YouTube feed to be almost entirely
| stuff that is interesting, educational, and that I think I'm
| getting value from.
|
| Those creators are still making orders of magnitude less
| money than people who make zero content attention grabbing
| controversy meme slop videos.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| > Those creators are still making orders of magnitude less
| money than people who make zero content attention grabbing
| controversy meme slop videos.
|
| Off the top of my head, Gamers Nexus is a counterpoint.
| Obviously not Mr Beast-scale, but we're also looking at a
| huge difference in target demographic breadth.
|
| Besides, is YouTube any worse in this regard than what came
| before it? Substance-free reality TV predates YouTube. For
| as long as cheap printing and mail services have been
| around, artists have had strong incentive to go design ads
| rather than pursue their art independently.
|
| YouTube definitely has a race to the bottom going on, but
| it's not all-consuming and well-researched, high-quality
| material is still profitable for creators as long as you
| know how to play the thumbnail game.
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| > Substance-free reality TV predates YouTube
|
| And I would say 99% of it is worse than the goofy YouTube
| stuff. Reality TV is mostly people hooking up and
| pretending to fall in love.
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| But are they enjoying what they are doing? If so, then what
| difference does it make how much cash YT hands to Mr.
| Beast?
|
| While many try to make a living off YouTube (and some do)
| there are no guarantees offered nor should any be expected.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| It's not YouTube per se that's bad. YouTube is just a symptom.
| The underlying pathology is advertising. The attention economy,
| surveillance capitalism. Those are the real problems. Those are
| the reasons behind this distortion of the world. They enable
| people who make moronic meme videos to make orders of magnitude
| more money than people who actually try to contribute something
| to society.
| gosub100 wrote:
| It's infinitely better than television because you can remove
| ads and choose what you want to see! I know you never compared
| it to TV but that was the main mode of entertainment before
| streaming.
|
| I think it's meaningless to criticize MBs content because it's
| a kids show. Of course it's formulaic and predictable. And I
| dislike his content too, and blocked him from my feed a year or
| two ago.
| j_timberlake wrote:
| How to Succeed in a Torment Nexus: Make the best TORMENT NEXUS
| videos possible
| joe_g_young wrote:
| The A,B and C teams seem to line up with the Sociopath, clueless,
| and losers in Gervais Principle.. or at least from this
| url(https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-
| principle-...)
| gzer0 wrote:
| This point caught my attention, as my experience has been quite
| different, though in completely different industries. How does
| one go about finding genuinely good consultants, in any industry?
| > "Use Consultants Consultants are literally cheat
| codes. Need to make the world's largest slice of cake? Start off
| by calling the person who made the previous world's largest slice
| of cake lol. He's already done countless tests and can save you
| weeks worth of work. I really want to drill this point home
| because I'm a massive believer in consultants. Because I've spent
| almost a decade of my life hyper obsessing over YouTube, I can
| show a brand new creator how to go from 100 subscribers to 10,000
| in a month. On their own it would take them years to do it.
| Consults are a gift from god, please take advantage of them. In
| every single freakin task assigned to you, always always always
| ask yourself first if you can find a consultant to help you. This
| is so important that I am demanding you repeat this three times
| in your head "I will always check for consultants when I'm
| assigned a task""
| SonOfLilit wrote:
| Disclaimer: I'm a software consultant, so obviously biased.
|
| MrBeast enters a new domain every week so consultants are way
| more important to him than to a software business.
|
| He has enough budget and fame to, as he says, use the Guinness
| Word Records book as a phonebook. Or any other resource that
| records world-famous achievements. So that's one way.
|
| Another is to have friends in the business that can recommend
| people they worked with.
|
| I'm not sure a third consistent way exists.
|
| Edit: very good technical people can recognize very good people
| in very different technical fields by their thinking and
| communication habits. Same for business people I believe. So if
| you have a wonderful devops employee/consultant and need an ML
| consultant but have zero idea how to evaluate them, have your
| devops guy talk to a few candidates and ask him whether they're
| good technical people.
| pocketarc wrote:
| I think the key thing here is he's talking about "the person
| who made the previous world's largest slice of cake".
|
| In other words, if I were working on a new programming language
| (just as an example), and could go hire Anders Hejlsberg as a
| consultant, well, that -is- going to be a mega cheat code. The
| amount of experience he'd bring to bear to even a 30 minute
| call would be insane. He would save me months or even years in
| mistakes and bad directions, and lead me straight to the core
| of whatever I wanted to do.
|
| That's the thing - he's not talking about hiring a generic
| "cake consultant". With that in mind, it'd be much easier to
| find those people - you'd know them by their achievements.
| potsandpans wrote:
| Just an aside, not arguing...
|
| You don't necessarily need to hire someone like Anders to
| pick their brain.
|
| A lot of people who are not huge in the zeitgeist (and also
| are not assholes) are surprisingly reachable.
|
| Funnily enough, I've chatted with Anders about programming
| language design -- I got the impression he thought my ideas
| were terrible.
|
| For a while, you could just email Noam Chomsky and he would
| respond.
| atomicUpdate wrote:
| Both of the examples in the quote give you the answer: talk to
| someone that's actually done it.
|
| It's always amazing to me how often the person 3 desks over has
| already solved the same problem, but is never asked how by the
| next person. Instead, too many people act like they're the
| first person to ever attempt whatever they're working on.
| solatic wrote:
| It's really a question of your expectations.
|
| If you're a software shop, hiring an army of consultants to
| build out core parts of your solution who will walk away when
| they're finished, you're doing it wrong. Success doesn't come
| from assembling piles of slop, it comes from putting together a
| team that will stick together to build value over the long
| term.
|
| If you're an individual who wants to improve X part of
| themselves (fitness, musical ability, scholarship, whatever)
| then hiring a "consultant" (a trainer, a coach, a tutor, a
| therapist) is not only massively beneficial but almost an
| essential part of the process. You can easily measure the value
| you're getting from the consultant against the progress you're
| making.
|
| If you're assembling highly complicated custom work on strict
| deadlines, hiring experts in that specific area of
| customization is pretty critical to consistently making those
| deadlines.
|
| > How do you find them?
|
| Connections, networking, and reputation, usually. MrBeast is
| lucky in that YouTube presents a good search platform; trying
| to find people who had made massive cakes before was probably
| just 5 minutes of searching and sorting by views.
| arder wrote:
| This, like a lot of the advice is "Things that worked for me
| that likely won't work for you". A lot of people are going to
| talk to Mr Beast that won't talk to you, Mr Beast is doing a
| variety of one off projects that he'll never need to revisit.
| Mr Beast has a shit tonne of money and a shit tonne of
| resources. For all those reasons, it's something that he can do
| that you probably can't.
| foooorsyth wrote:
| Are you dealing with MBB consultants? These are ivy-educated
| MBAs with no operating experience and no real expertise in
| almost anything other than powerpoint and credential
| attainment.
|
| Mr Beast is talking about _actual experts_ in incredibly niche
| things, like baking giant cakes. Completely different type of
| person to the extent that "consultant" is just a total
| misnomer if you're used to the term in the land of F1000 corpo-
| speak. Mr Beast is probably reaching out to people guerilla-
| style that don't even have "consulting" firms -- which makes
| total sense if you're doing crazy stuff on YouTube.
| MailleQuiMaille wrote:
| He is sick. This is the work of a sick person. He even knows that
| he is sick but does not care, because of the sickness. I pray for
| his audience, really.
|
| What's this about the Squid Game video and the half a mil lost
| because of the "waiting in the sun" ? Did someone die ???
| simonw wrote:
| Here's the squid game story. Thankfully nobody died but it was
| not a safely run set:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/02/style/mrbeast-beast-games...
| h4ny wrote:
| For anyone who isn't aware of the problematic issues currently
| surrounding MrBeast (see sweeeter's comment here for some context
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41549649#41551656), I
| encourage you to read the linked Rolling Stone document and
| actually find a working link of the original leaked document and
| read it (link in post doesn't work).
|
| The blog post happens to miss a few of the points in the original
| document that would raise a lot of eyebrows and I'm not sure that
| it's a fair take on "what it takes to run a massive scale viral
| YouTube operation" if it lands you in all sorts of management
| trouble and potentially criminal allegations.
| jordanmorgan10 wrote:
| I just couldn't with this, until the very last page. I feel like
| so many founders write and expect performance like this, and they
| miss what he said at the very, very end.
|
| So, I'll give him credit for that.
| foundart wrote:
| I know virtually nothing about Mr Beast other than that he's
| massively successful due to dumb videos that apparently raise
| lots of ethical questions.
|
| That's not an endeavor I'd be interested in participating in, but
| I did find the PDF fascinating and read all of it.
|
| A good bit of his guide is about 1. taking responsibility for
| delivering what you are expected to 2. keeping the big picture in
| mind
|
| Plenty of folks could benefit from that advice and the examples
| he provides to make it more concrete.
| vagab0nd wrote:
| "How to be lucky"
| Animats wrote:
| Actual PDF, 2 links away from the original article.[1]
|
| Has a lot in common with Roger Corman's "How I made a hundred
| movies in Hollywood and never lost a dime."
|
| [1] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YaG9xpu-
| WQKBPUi8yQ4HaDYQLUS...
| steve1977 wrote:
| Will have to read this (the PDF) in a free minute. Almost sounds
| a bit like the Manual by KLF (which was for dance music
| production)
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Manual
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| > Here's a darker note from the section "Random things you should
| know":
|
| >> Do not leave consteatants waiting in the sun (ideally waiting
| in general) for more than 3 hours. Squid game it cost us $500,000
| and boys vs girls it got a lot of people out. Ask James to know
| more
|
| Can someone explain this to me? I don't quite get what the
| original quote means.
| simonw wrote:
| The conditions when filming their Squid Game episode weren't
| great for contestants: https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-
| movies/tv-movie-features/net...
|
| I don't know what "cost us $500,000" refers to though.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| medical expenses and lawyers I imagine.
| csomar wrote:
| s/consteatants/contestants. My guess is that they left the
| players in Squid game is the sun and someone got hurt?
| gorgoiler wrote:
| If I can turn a C player into a B player, can I eventually get
| them to A player status? Is there an effective strategy to
| getting someone to open their eyes, participate actively, and
| ramp up their performance to the highest levels?
|
| I worry that C player status is something fundamentally broken
| about a person. Maybe it's as simple as their intellectual
| capacity?
| lofenfew wrote:
| >If I can turn a C player into a B player, can I eventually get
| them to A player status?
|
| By definition yes, because a B player by definition can be
| turned into an A player. But by that token, anyone that can be
| turned into a B player, is by definition a B player already.
| Hence, a C player, who is by definition _not_ a B player,
| cannot be _turned_ into a B player.
|
| >I worry that C player status is something fundamentally broken
| about a person. Maybe it's as simple as their intellectual
| capacity?
|
| It would be motivation. Intellectual capacity can in principle
| be fixed, but motivation cannot because you would need to
| motivate them to fix it.
| CalRobert wrote:
| "Since we are on the topic of communication, written
| communication also does not constitute communication unless they
| confirm they read it."
|
| Gonna keep that one handy.
| popinman322 wrote:
| Huge +1. If I'd understood this mantra earlier in my career it
| would have saved me a large amount of hassle.
|
| For juniors: any time you send something important to your
| manager, confirm they read the document. Don't ask "did you
| read it?" Don't rely on reactions in chat. Ask a specific
| question that would require them to read the contents of the
| document. For example, if you're sending over a quote from a
| vendor, and you'd already sent another quote before, you could
| ask "how does this quote compare to the previous one? [link to
| previous one]" Always get confirmation at least 24-48 hours in
| advance of the point-of-no-return (e.g. launch, meeting,
| changing dates, company-wide emails), very preferably in
| writing.
|
| And for _very_ important meetings, ensure all parties have
| either acknowledged understanding of the required information,
| or schedule pre-meeting briefings with individuals. There's
| nothing quite like getting thrown under the bus because someone
| showed up and couldn't figure out the subtleties & context on
| the fly. Unfortunately you can't just say "it's a 12 page
| document for a reason." when your manager is confused in front
| of their manager.
| jameskraus wrote:
| This has one of the best sections I've read on why communication
| lines are important:
|
| >It's very important as a company we maintain proper
| communication lines. ... If you skip and just go below you
| prizemust then call and let the people in charge know. Let's say
| you're a production coordinator and you call a writer and tell
| him you need some bits about a sandwich being cooked with lava,
| seems harmless... and then tyler askes her why she is making lava
| and she has no idea and everyone is confused. This is what
| happens when you don't follow proper communication lines.
|
| Skipping over all the typos, it's just such a great visual of the
| communication breakdowns that can happen when a lot of things are
| going on.
|
| Also this section on tracking contractors:
|
| > [Y]ou can't just dump and forget your projects... Ask him to
| send videos everyday to spot problems early, hell maybe talk to
| him twice a day. I don't care just don't leave room for error. No
| excuses, stop leaving room for error. Check in daily, receive
| videos, and know weeks in advance if you're fucked. Not days.
|
| This is more extreme than I encounter in my day to day, very on
| brand to MrBeast, but it's interesting to see this constant
| accountability and ownership are so critical in their production.
| I see similar behavior in some of the more effective people I've
| worked with.
| seydor wrote:
| He already has a huge audience so whatever he puts in that PDF is
| not really useful to anyone else.
|
| Surprised that he says he studied youtube virality. It seemed
| that he got his ideas from 80s prank TV but over time his titles
| became increasingly audacious.
|
| Also surprised that his videos are being watched to the end. The
| clickbait generates curiosity for watching , but his vids are so
| predictable it s totally boring
|
| Everybody's riding the "MrBeast" train because he s so successful
| , even though they truly don't like him. 3 years down the line he
| will be in court defending his abuses
| throw16180339 wrote:
| I think many readers would benefit from the sections on
| communication, ownership, and responsibility. I've seen way too
| many projects fail because of poor communication.
| pests wrote:
| It's odd as this was leaked and big on YouTube at least a week
| ago. I guess not much overlap of this community and YT drama.
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| Despite whatever we think of Mr Beast, these instructions have
| helped build something impressive. The principles are
| interesting, and could be applied to build other impressive
| things. I like that. Elements that particularly stand out to me:
|
| 1. Taking direct ownership
|
| 2. Doing things that are effective, even though they're socially
| uncomfortable
|
| 3. Working towards the goal, to the detriment of other things
| which sound good but are not the goal
|
| 4. The way they fight to keep retention to incremental
| checkpoints. I don't know if this has any applications for
| Engineering, but certainly for marketing and communication it
| does.
|
| 5. The claimed method of constantly evaluating his employees
| _really_ appeals to me
| BrenBarn wrote:
| Some people have alluded to this, but I find it sad that so much
| energy in our modern society goes towards trying to exploit
| arbitrary particularities of arbitrary platforms. Even if we set
| aside the stuff like "you're taking a risk building on YouTube
| because they could ban you", there's the more practical stuff
| about how the plan is all about the title and thumbnail. Like if
| YouTube somehow switched to letting you have two thumbnails, or
| some other UI element that you could customize, suddenly everyone
| playing this game would have to scramble to figure out how to
| maximize in that environment.
|
| It just seems to me like following a rich person around hoping
| some coins will fall out of their pocket. It's a parasitic
| ecosystem that encourages content to focus more and more on "what
| works" in the self-perpetuating context of that ecosystem, and
| less and less on making contact with any kind of external
| reality.
| laserbeam wrote:
| > suddenly everyone playing this game would have to scramble to
| figure out how to maximize in that environment
|
| These people are the best positioned to figure this out.
| They've been experimenting with youtube changes for years and
| they already know how to experiment out the particularities.
| sigmoid10 wrote:
| It's clear by now that youtube is just a platform designed to
| produce the Infinite Jest video. Mr. Beast accordingly just
| appears to be a step on the way there.
| nobrains wrote:
| What is the alternative? Don't do the above, and hence not get
| the views, and hence not be able to sustain what you wanted to
| build.
| bawolff wrote:
| I don't feel this is that different from software eng jobs. We
| A/B test things to death just to get tiny metrics improvements.
|
| Sometimes i feel like we shit on youtube creators because it
| seems like what they do is silly or frivolous. But is that last
| software feature you worked on that nobody is ever going to use
| but is needed to check a box so marketing can say we meet some
| standard so that we can sell the product to some big corp
| decision maker who is never going to actually use the software,
| really any better?
|
| Jobs a job. Ultimately people are doing it to pay the bills,
| not for the sake of art.
| chidog12 wrote:
| This is literally everything in the creative industry...
| FactKnower69 wrote:
| if you genuinely think that "literally everything in the
| creative industry" is chasing trends within the well-defined
| boundaries of existing paradigms that giant corporations have
| created for you, you aren't a creative
| rldjbpin wrote:
| interesting to see this leaked a few weeks after the valve one
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41329274), albeit
| unrelated.
|
| if an actual one, to me it is another interesting perspective
| inside the minds of a privately-owned, internet-based party that
| hold a significant mind-share in its domain.
| sd9 wrote:
| The Valve one has been floating around for years
| trustno2 wrote:
| I hate the actual content he produces - the first time I watched
| it, I kept thinking it's a trailer because of all the cuts and I
| wondered, where is the actual video, when I realized no, I am
| watching the actual video - but I have to commend the grind.
|
| He is trully obsessive about getting the most views, almost
| soullessly designing the perfect viral content, caring about
| every second. He literally starts with the thumbnail and title
| and only then works out the rest of the video!
|
| I also like this 2 years old video of visiting his studio. This
| guy literally sleeps in his giant studio, everything is super
| optimized.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUzpK0tGFcE
|
| Of course the end result is entirely pointless. But still. I
| respect the grind.
|
| (I also love when he "builds 1000 houses in Africa" or whatever,
| and he usually never even mentions the country or the place name.
| It's not that important. But at least he does some good, I
| guess.)
| phito wrote:
| It's just fast food content.
| trustno2 wrote:
| Yeah and I respect fast food chains in this regard. So, that
| makes sense.
| seydor wrote:
| except it doesnt even feed you
| lionkor wrote:
| Arguably neither does fast food - it gives you energy, but
| it's also quite bad for your health _and_ your wallet. So,
| it feeds you, sure, but the negatives likely far outweigh
| the positives.
|
| If you've ever cooked meals for multiple days with just
| some ground beef, cabbage and some lettuce and friends for
| ~10 bucks per day, you'll see how crazy expensive a $20
| fast food ""meal"" is.
|
| So this is fast food content, because it does entertain,
| but you could do many things to get good entertainment and
| also not consume absolute slop.
| prmoustache wrote:
| Fast food aren't worth much nutritionally so they aren't
| much different.
| lm28469 wrote:
| There is a reason it's called "content", "content" for the
| mere "container" we've become
| theshrike79 wrote:
| Average Americans (his main audience) always visit "Europe" or
| "Africa", never mentioning a specific country.
| systemtest wrote:
| In similar fashion, European students with a gap-year will go
| backpacking in Asia
| yeukhon wrote:
| Lol he didn't build 1000 houses. 100 only. But also, I think
| many of the houses were rushed to build... so...
| earljwagner wrote:
| > He is trully obsessive about getting the most views, almost
| soullessly designing the perfect viral content, caring about
| every second. He literally starts with the thumbnail and title
| and only then works out the rest of the video!
|
| That sounds like standard goal-oriented planning. Amazon starts
| with the product's press release. "The Amazon working backward
| method is a product development approach that starts with the
| team imagining the product is ready to ship. The product team's
| first step is to draft a press release announcing the product's
| availability. The audience for this press release is the
| product's customer."
|
| https://www.productplan.com/glossary/working-backward-amazon...
| Jabbles wrote:
| Let's fact check that final comment:
|
| "I Built 100 Houses And Gave Them Away!" 127M views, mentions
| Jamaica 45 seconds in:
| https://youtu.be/KkCXLABwHP0?si=3oMfNy0iAGVrTwqo&t=45
|
| "I Built 100 Wells In Africa" 202M views, mentions Kenya 12
| seconds in:
| https://youtu.be/mwKJfNYwvm8?si=qYc8jZWsYXwF1qrm&t=11
|
| "We Powered a Village in Africa" 26M views (different channel),
| mentions Kenya 12 seconds in:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FQvRZg3bcg
| veunes wrote:
| MrBeast has a deep understanding of his audience. He often
| tailors his content based on what resonates with viewers, and he
| uses feedback to continuously improve. But still there are some
| problems with approach
| mda wrote:
| Yikes, I am glad I never watch that channel, probably
| instinctively sensed its rotten smell from distance.
| baggachipz wrote:
| Never watched one video either, but it seems to just be "Ow, my
| balls!"
|
| Just useless brain rot.
| snickmy wrote:
| Just wanted to add, completely unrelated to the line of business
| and the moral judgement on what Mr Beast Production does, that I
| really cherish seeing such a well written onboarding material.
| The sharpness in articulation, the consistency in the leadership
| vision, and the cultural undertone is of very high level. For
| comparison, any tech company I've worked for, doesn't get even
| closer, drawing in acronyms, micro-cultures and personal
| interest.
| phonon wrote:
| He has annual revenues in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
| "lol"
| brrrrrm wrote:
| goes to show formal language isn't a necessary component of
| high communication. might even be antagonistic
| qwertox wrote:
| > Prelude (idk what this means)
|
| 10 second lookup for an "important" document...
| deskr wrote:
| Excellent write up. Intolerable videos.
| throwpoaster wrote:
| See dogpack404 on YouTube for counterpoints on Mr Beast.
| sharpshadow wrote:
| The pdf is fine nothing really sensational. Some good advise for
| video creators and how to commit to succeed at their company.
| Written in what you need to invest not what you need to
| sacrifice. The bar is high which is fine tho. For example he
| wants one to work on 3 different projects on a workday instead of
| 1 project for 3 workdays.
|
| I watched one video of MrBeast in the past and the pdf explains
| well why I actually watched it to the end. I do dislike these
| kind of videos and don't watch them but success is success and he
| does things right. One of his rules which is kind of neat is that
| the clickbait title and thumbnail needs to deliver on the promise
| - which is a great concept considering over 97% clickbait isn't.
| newaccount74 wrote:
| I think following through on the crazy thumbnail is the most
| defining part of the MrBeast brand.
|
| Lots of Yt videos have crazy thumbnails; only MrBeast follows
| through!
| j7ake wrote:
| His section on monitoring your information diet is generally
| applicable to many fields.
|
| If you want to be expert in X, consume content in X (in addition
| to the deliberate practice and focus on the craft of X).
| doix wrote:
| There are lot of comments here disliking MrBeast and what not,
| but some of the advice can definitely apply to all organizations.
|
| > Your goal here is to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible.
| That's the number one goal of this production company. It's not
| to make the best produced videos. Not to make the funniest
| videos. Not to make the best looking videos. Not the highest
| quality videos.. It's to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible.
|
| Replace "youtube videos" with whatever the company is trying to
| achieve. I see it all the time in large organizations, where
| different teams forget what the goal of the company is and
| instead get hyperfocused on their teams KPI's to the detriment of
| the company as a whole.
|
| Lawyers finding problems and trying to stop things from happening
| instead of finding solutions. Security blocking things and not
| suggesting alternatives. IT blocking this or that instead of
| trying solve problems, etc.
| duxup wrote:
| Your comment reminded me of the old content vs process Steve
| Jobs commentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4dCJJFuMsE
|
| But I agree, it's so tempting to get internally focused, or
| focused on "improvement" that really shifts the focus to
| something else entirely (hollywood style movies, tv shows,
| whatever).
|
| Personally I'm no fan of the youtube-ism and youtube generally,
| but it's clear that game is it's own game. It's not making a
| movie, it's not a TV show, it's not even tiktok. It's its own
| thing and it is pretty clear that generally you have to play
| that platform's game.
|
| My kids play a lot of roblox, and while there's a lot of copy
| cat games based on traditional gaming, there's almost a system
| on roblox as far as what games are popular as far as ease of
| jumping in goes and so on. And there's a lot of weird
| creativity you find nowhere else as far as the topics of the
| games (want to be a bug? you can do that). That's it's own
| space too.
| kspacewalk2 wrote:
| >Lawyers finding problems and trying to stop things from
| happening instead of finding solutions.
|
| Sounds like they're doing their jobs, which is to protect your
| future selves from your current selves. Sure, finding solutions
| is great, but faulting them from finding problems and slowing
| things down until solutions are found is odd.
|
| Yes, security or IT does sometime have to act as a reality
| check in an organization that has over-hired over-zealous but
| under-experienced go-getters who want to "move fast and break
| things". They are a vital counterweight that makes ambition
| productive, instead of allowing it to wreck the organization's
| reputation.
| duxup wrote:
| I'm going to interject my own experiences and note that some
| legal advice seems excessively risk averse and honestly just
| defaults to "no" and lazy. I suspect that's what the OP might
| have been referencing.
|
| I know we're generally concerned with the folks playing fast
| and loose with the rules here, and that's 100% true, but. I
| find in big orgs sometimes it's far more on the other end of
| the spectrum.
| Ma8ee wrote:
| And sometimes security or IT just play it excessively, and
| never allow anything just to make sure they can't be blamed
| for anything:
|
| "No, you can't improve the situation with the Linux servers
| that hasn't been updated since 2013 because those servers
| don't exist in our roadmap, and therefore there's no policy
| document that we can lean on to make any decisions. So the
| servers stay in their miserable state until we can phase over
| all customers that use those servers to some other product
| eventually. In a few years. Hopefully."
|
| Note that the above isn't fiction, but exactly what happened
| a few months ago. Luckily I managed to transfer to a team
| that didn't have to deal with those servers.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| See this all the time - for example, zealous dev "if I had
| production DB read/write I could get things done so much
| faster."
|
| Sure, but the production DB has an incredible amount of PII
| and we are audited out the wazoo, but even if that weren't
| the case and it was totally fine, all it takes is you being
| careless with your credentials one time and the company's
| hosed or we have a massive breach, or some rogue employee
| encrypts the data with ransomware. So, yes, it would make you
| faster, and no, you can't have it. It's insane how often I
| have this type of conversation and insane how often I am the
| bad guy in it.
| __turbobrew__ wrote:
| The solution is replicating the DB and scrubbing the PII.
| Then the dev can go wild.
|
| This is a solution oriented approach instead of a lazy ass
| covering approach which I think the GP was referring to.
| The job should be finding risks and then figuring out how
| to work around those risks. Very rarely are there no
| solutions, most of the time it is due to general laziness
| or in aptitude where someone can find risks but they do not
| find solutions.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| > The solution is replicating the DB and scrubbing the
| PII. Then the dev can go wild.
|
| In this particular example, often this isn't remotely
| feasible, either from a business logic standpoint (I can
| think of plenty of fintech examples), lack of qualified
| DBA/sysadmins, network admins, cloud cost constraints,
| methods and controls to ensure to auditors that devs
| cannot access production data - none of this is trivial,
| and often to the dev it seems "silly" they may need to
| wait a few hours for something they could technically
| access in a few minutes, but acting like these solutions
| have no tradeoffs or are always worth doing suggests a
| lack of knowledge as to how these things actually work in
| a business and on a development team. It certainly isn't
| always laziness, and I'd even say it's not laziness that
| often at all.
| bayindirh wrote:
| > Replace "youtube videos" with whatever the company is trying
| to achieve.
|
| Some counterpoints:
|
| - Xerox knowingly didn't fix the problematic gear trains to
| guarantee periodic part changes, prioritizing money over "best
| copier possible".
|
| - Ford didn't fix Pinto's fuel tank, prioritizing cost
| minimization over "best possible car in its class".
|
| - Microsoft is did tons of shady things in its OS development
| history to prioritize domination over "best OS possible",
| sometimes actively degrading the good features and parts of its
| OS.
|
| - Dyson's some batteries are notorious for killing themselves
| via firmware on slight cell imbalance instead of doing self-
| balancing. Dyson prioritize "steady income via killing good
| parts early" instead of "building the best vacuum possible".
|
| - Many more electronic and electromechanical systems are
| engineered with short lives to prioritize "minimizing costs and
| maximizing profit" over "building the best X possible".
|
| - Lastly, Boeing's doing all kinds of shady stuff (MCAS, doors,
| build quality, etc.) since they prioritize "maximize
| shareholder value" over "building the best planes possible".
|
| - ...and there's Intel, but I think the idea is clear here.
| willvarfar wrote:
| Their definition of "best copier possible" was "most-
| profitable copier possible", meaning they had to balance
| getting people to not hate it so much they chose competitors,
| while not being so reliable it didn't need warrantees and
| services and parts etc?
| bayindirh wrote:
| > not being so reliable it didn't need warrantees[sic] and
| services and parts etc?
|
| The thing is, nothing is completely maintenance free, esp.
| if there's something mechanical. Make wearing parts wear,
| core parts robust. All my laser printers were Samsung/Xerox
| (hah), and their "core" is made like a tank. Only its
| rollers, toner and imaging/drum kits wear down, and these
| are already consumables.
|
| The device keeps track the life of every of these
| replaceable components, and you replace them you hit these
| marks, because they're already worn down to hinder reliable
| operation (Imager dies at 9K pages, rollers at 20K pages
| IIRC).
|
| You don't need to make things fail prematurely to make
| something profitable. First one of these printers didn't
| have replaceable rollers, so I had to donate it after 11
| years of operation. This one is almost 8 years old IIRC,
| and it's still going strong. I'll be using it as long as I
| can find spares for it, because it's engineered
| "correctly", not "for profit". Meantime, its manufacturer
| can still profit from parts, toner and imaging units.
| willvarfar wrote:
| Not copiers, but the ice cream machines in mcdonalds
| resturants were kept unreliable because mcdonalds made
| money on the constant repairs. It didn't matter to them
| that the franchisee was losing money. When 3rd party
| companies jumped in to fix the machines the manufacturer
| and mcdonalds acted to stop that happening. There was a
| court case brought by the third party companies, which
| they recently lost.
| bornfreddy wrote:
| > ...they recently lost.
|
| Who is "they"?
| chongli wrote:
| They being the third party repair companies. Johnny
| Harris did a long piece on the whole story [1].
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrDEtSlqJC4
| kchr wrote:
| Actually, it looks like the feds have sided with the 3rd
| parties?
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/14/24101023/ftc-doj-
| comment-...
| singleshot_ wrote:
| Why did you write sic after you quoted "warrantees"?
| bayindirh wrote:
| The correct spelling is "warranties" (since singular y
| becomes i when it gets plural).
|
| [sic] means "I copied the word as written in its
| original, and it was already written that way" [0].
|
| [0]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sic
| willvarfar wrote:
| I probably meant warranties but warrantees works in the
| sentence just fine too :)
| bayindirh wrote:
| Hey, as long as it's readable, I don't care. I just
| wanted to note that I quoted you verbatim, not judge you
| because you pressed letter "e" twice instead of once in
| an internet forum. :)
| michaelt wrote:
| In my experience, people very rarely use [sic] when
| quoting on internet forums - readers will assume any
| quote was copied and pasted; and the quoted text is
| directly above yours.
| flyingpenguin wrote:
| I think something that companies often miss is that
| improving the experience in an area where you have a
| monopoly can still increase profits by encouraging
| increased usage of that area.
|
| The example I always go to is U-Haul in the US. They have
| a functional monopoly on quickly getting a pickup truck
| or small box car. I used to tell people there was no need
| to own a pickup truck because I could go grab one for $30
| once or twice a month when I needed it.
|
| After a year of shitty apps, constantly being sold things
| I didn't need because they try to secretly upsell you 50
| times during checkout. Having to go into the store to get
| the keys and wait in line for 1 hour behind people
| screaming about how they were cheated... I bought a
| truck.
|
| U-Hual still has their monopoly, but they lost my
| business, not because I went to a competitor, but because
| I altered my life to no longer need their business.
|
| Maybe instead of buying eink tablets, I would have kept
| printing things had printers been better products.
| nothercastle wrote:
| U-haul is one of the shittiest experiences possible.
| Right there with calling comcast and going to the dmv.
| Compare that to truck rental from Lowe's or Home Depot
| that's actually probably more expensive but way more
| pleasant.
|
| Only problem is that everyone else also has figured that
| out so hard to secure one.
| IanCal wrote:
| Those are problematic business goals, right? I think that's
| very different to aligning team goals to company goals.
| richardw wrote:
| Those still seem like examples of "whatever the company is
| trying to achieve", be it profitability, domination, cost
| minimisation etc.
| folken wrote:
| I think this is exactly the point that MrBeast is trying to
| make.
|
| By being best YOUTUBE videos it means to focus on whatever
| appeals to the algorithm. It doesn't mean you are better
| informed, or better entertained, as long as the click-
| through-rate is great and the minutes people watch the video
| is maximized.
|
| You could say the same thing is true for Xerox, for them the
| best doesn't necessary mean that they sell you the best most
| reliable copier, but the highest grossing product, with a
| guaranteed post-sale income.
|
| And this is why we can't have nice things.
| duxup wrote:
| There was a blog post linked on HN a while ago, it was
| about their start up they ran many years ago. They got
| traction with clients and were a very "engineering focused"
| (or similar term) organization. Their code was rock solid.
|
| It was all going great, until suddenly some new company
| showed up and started taking their customers. Their new
| competitor's software was a mess with all sorts of
| incomplete or pure vaporware features.... but they did get
| features out fast.
|
| They got beat out by Salesforce...
|
| We as people pick the winners with our money, we don't
| really want nice things.
| awuji wrote:
| But most of the time, we as engineers don't pick the
| winners. Some C-Suite executive or middle manager, who
| isn't very technically inclined, picks the winners, and
| we as engineers are forced to make it work.
|
| As I don't think a engineer has ever had the chance to
| choose a company's CRM, the CRM with better marketing
| would always win over the CRM with better engineering.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| Question I would pose is, why _should_ engineer have the
| decision on a new CRM?
|
| They can provide _input_ regarding e.g. maintainability,
| but majority of input would come from other stakeholders
| - users and business unit owning the customers whose
| relationship we want managed, ideally primarily. And it
| is somebodys job to take these inputs into collective
| whole.
|
| It was a mind blowing exercise to me 15 years ago when I
| was telling my boss how horrible our current installation
| of some ERP software was, and be asked me what's the user
| perspective. They log in every day, run financial reports
| they need, and log out. The system was _great_ from their
| perspective! They had even less concern for my
| perspective of poor architecture and suboptimal
| implementation, than I (at that point) had of their
| perspective and goals. Thank krishna I didn 't make the
| decisions on the CRM :-)
| PhasmaFelis wrote:
| Upthread, bayindirh posted half a dozen examples of
| financially-motivated decisions that were actively,
| deliberately hostile, sometimes fatal, to the customer.
| We're not just talking about good-enough fiddly details
| here.
| wpietri wrote:
| > We as people pick the winners with our money, we don't
| really want nice things.
|
| We do generally want nice things, but we can't be experts
| in all the things. In markets where you have mostly
| responsible actors, that can work out fine. But absent
| effective regulation or other feedback mechanisms, in
| many markets an actor who only cares about short-term
| cash extraction can beat out the people focused on long-
| term value by taking advantage of consumer ignorance.
|
| A good example here is food. Before the rise of
| industrial meat production, you would process meat
| yourself or buy it from a local butcher. You had a lot of
| information about the meat because the processing chain
| was short and local. You knew the people touching your
| food and could smell how clean they kept the butcher
| shop.
|
| But scaling that up created a lot of opacity. Suddenly it
| was much harder to know what went into your sausage. It
| was tens, hundreds, thousands of people involved, spread
| over many miles. Some dubious people took advantage, and
| so we ended up with food standards like the Federal Meat
| Inspection Act. [1] The system that grew out of that
| works pretty well; things Boar's Head recently killing 9
| people [2] are surprisingly rare.
|
| For things less risky than safety, I think a lot of good
| is done by people like Consumer Reports and Wirecutter.
| Less ignorance about which products are really good is
| less room for bad actors to exploit consumers. If people
| really didn't want nice things, those would be much less
| popular. Instead, I think they're a sign that people do
| want nice things, but just have an awful lot to do, and
| so can't spend much time on a single purchasing decision
| unless it's a really big deal for them.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Meat_Inspection
| _Act, with a nod to
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_list
| eriosis...
| campbel wrote:
| Great examples. I think another case, especially in
| business/it, is that the people doing the purchasing
| aren't often the people using the products. This means
| the incentive structure often doesn't prioritize a good
| product, but instead whatever appeals to the buyer
| (perhaps lower cost, features, created by a known entity,
| e.g. no one got fired buying ibm).
| DwnVoteHoneyPot wrote:
| > We do generally want nice things, but we can't be
| experts in all the things.
|
| Counter-point: People complain a lot about leg-room on
| airplanes. They say they'll pay more for leg room.
| However, it's very well known (empirically) that they
| won't pay. People want the cheapest seat - period.
|
| Leg room is very transparent. Consumers can't be fooled.
| People may want nice things, but they won't pay for it.
|
| Mr. Beast is just giving people what they empirically
| want.
| wpietri wrote:
| I don't think that's a great counterpoint for a few
| reasons.
|
| One is that leg room isn't particularly transparent. If I
| search for flights, the price is much more visible than a
| leg room measure. Two, people can certainly be fooled;
| for a long time airlines have been playing a game of
| gradually ratcheting back amenities without being up
| front about it. This is the same game that consumer
| packaged goods companies play with apparent package size.
| Three, people pay for more leg room all the time. Last I
| booked a flight, about half the plane was first class,
| business class, economy plus, or exit rows. Personally, I
| sometimes pay for it and sometimes don't. When I don't,
| it's sometimes because I resent how grossly extractive
| airlines have gotten.
|
| I also think "empirically want", however cute it is as a
| linguistic trick, is not particularly accurate. Is it
| what gets him paid? I'd believe it. Is it what they
| watch? Sometimes, for some people! But pretending that
| short-term behavior is equivalent to what somebody really
| wants is choosing to ignore a great deal. It's like
| saying alcoholics "want" to drink themselves to death.
| arcticbull wrote:
| Google Flights shows the leg room in inches, and there's
| several sites that you can research it on.
|
| However most concretely, back in 2000, American removed a
| few rows of coach across its entire narrow body fleet to
| give passengers an extra 3-5 inches of legroom throughout
| coach. They did not recover the costs and walked it back.
| jetBlue provides more legroom through all of coach, and
| even I as a very tall person, don't go out of my way to
| book them.
|
| _Some_ people will pay more for extra legroom, and I
| think the current split of seating in planes is likely
| right around the optimal distribution based on who will
| and won 't pay.
|
| > Two, people can certainly be fooled; for a long time
| airlines have been playing a game of gradually ratcheting
| back amenities without being up front about it.
|
| Kind of but not really. Yeah they're not going to put out
| a press release when they take the olives off your salad.
| Airlines are an incredibly low margin commodity business.
| Many years they're negative margins. American's current
| operating margin is 3.41% [1] This is typical. These
| aren't B2B SaaS margins we're talking about.
|
| So generally when they take the olives off your salad,
| instead of putting out a press release they just lower
| fares on competitive routes. Because most people book on
| fare or based on corporate contract, which is a second-
| order effect of fare.
|
| [1]
| https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAL/american-
| airli...
| bobthepanda wrote:
| i think the Jetblue thing is historically true but not
| anymore.
|
| The Jetblue thing is also not really altruistic, but a
| nice side effect of an optimization they did; the removal
| of the seats brought the capacity to their planes to a
| round number of 50, which happens to be the FAA required
| ratio of persons per flight attendant.
| OrigamiPastrami wrote:
| > jetBlue provides more legroom through all of coach, and
| even I as a very tall person, don't go out of my way to
| book them.
|
| How tall are you? I will literally skip a family vacation
| if I can't get a better seat on an airplane, to the point
| it's caused strain in my personal life.
|
| I agree with your overall assessment that people will
| (usually) buy the cheapest thing, but I find it utterly
| bizarre a truly tall person wouldn't even care about
| being physically uncomfortable for hours on end. I'm
| curious if we just disagree on what "very tall" means,
| like 6' is not that tall.
| arcticbull wrote:
| I'm 6'5". To be clear I do always try for an extra
| legroom seat unless it's like 1 or maybe 2 hours tops. I
| don't go out of my way to pick jetBlue, so the "everyone
| gets legroom" thing isn't a real competitive advantage. I
| just consolidate my flying with a carrier and with even
| the lowest status tiers you generally get free extra
| legroom seating. Not giving everyone extra legroom seats
| means they can lower the sticker price and reward
| frequent fliers. The short people don't get nearly as
| much benefit from the extra leg room and don't value the
| seat as much so higher density means lower prices for
| everyone.
|
| When I didn't have status I just paid for it, but every
| seat having extra legroom isn't in and of itself enough
| to move the needle for me.
| david422 wrote:
| Well the other thing is paying for luggage. No-one wants
| to pay for luggage. But if luggage is free, it means that
| everyone with no/small luggage is just subsidizing those
| with luggage.
| tintor wrote:
| Charging for luggage is fine.
|
| The problem is when luggage costs the same or more as
| ticket without luggage.
| geon wrote:
| I don't think I've ever seen the legroom listed on a
| flight comparison site. Is that a thing?
| dagw wrote:
| Google flights lists legroom for most flights. Although
| it doesn't seem like you can filter on legroom.
| whizzter wrote:
| The question is, was it rock solid with few features? I
| don't know if it was this article I saw earlier but
| seeing how Salesforce has a lot of customizability and a
| Visual builder and maybe much of it was vaporware
| initially but maybe they simply scratched the right
| annoyances the customers had by providing features for
| that quickly enough.
|
| Seen some ERP's for mid-sized customers and the good ones
| makes it easy to build views and otherwise customize the
| software up to a point for non-engineers. The code is
| shit but they've also produced a lot of things needed
| internally that we wouldn't have gotten done quickly
| enough by doing it manually.
|
| https://retool.com/blog/salesforce-for-engineers
| duxup wrote:
| IIRC the start up was beaten out by volume of features,
| granted some didn't work on Salesforce, but people buy
| software based on features for sure.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _We as people pick the winners with our money, we don
| 't really want nice things._
|
| What was the price(s) of that start up and what was the
| prices of Salesforce? What were the features of the start
| up and that of Salesforce?
|
| Different people think different things are "nice"
| (correctly or incorrectly). If you're offering things
| that you think are nice, but the customer does not care
| about, are you surprised that they go elsewhere?
|
| You also have to understand what customers _say_ they
| want, and the things that they are _actually_ going to
| evaluate on: the two may not be the same.
|
| And even if we want the nice things, we may not actually
| be able to afford them.
| maxrecursion wrote:
| I've been seeing a product we use at my organization roll
| out incomplete/trash feature fast to have a product, and
| then fix them after the fact.
|
| We've gotten tons of blow back as other teams use the
| product and find it next to useless with tons of bugs,
| and I'm stuck trying to push it. Not a fun place to be.
|
| Learned a lot about the software market and capitalism
| though.
| MisterTea wrote:
| > We as people pick the winners with our money, we don't
| really want nice things.
|
| We? I was IT for a brief period and one day management
| says "We need this Salesforce Outlook plugin deployed to
| all the front office users." No one bothered to tell us
| "Hey, we're evaluating CRM software and would appreciate
| your technical opinion."
|
| So there's your "we" and I'm sure they weren't looking
| for quality engineering or rock solid code when deciding.
| In fact it was picked because the manager heard the name
| salesforce at some business conference and was told by
| someone there it was the best CRM out there so you better
| get on that train or be left in the dust. So we installed
| the plugins, got paid and moved on with life. And to be
| honest we didn't care either.
| wyager wrote:
| > We as people pick the winners with our money, we don't
| really want nice things.
|
| I do, and I reject being branded as part of "we" here;
| most people and orgs just have bad taste. ("Taste" at an
| organizational level obviously being an emergent property
| rather than literally the same as the homonymous trait in
| individuals.)
| sunnybeetroot wrote:
| I think part of Apple's success is because they give
| people nice things.
| j45 wrote:
| The market is always looking to be seen, understood and
| helped.
|
| Even a little help in the mix of those 3 can be
| overlooked more than it ought to be.
|
| Perfect really is the enemy of Great/Good.
| feoren wrote:
| > [They] were a very "engineering focused" (or similar
| term) organization. Their code was rock solid.
|
| I'll bet it wasn't. You're hearing this from the person
| who ran the company. Most companies have terrible code,
| and I'll bet the people running those companies would
| also say they were "engineering focused" and had "rock
| solid" code. They're just wrong.
| GTP wrote:
| > And this is why we can't have nice things.
|
| Indeed, and that's why OP wrote its list of counterpoints.
| In theory, a company can make a lot of money by creating
| products that are aligned with users' interests.
| Unfortunately, in today's world this is more difficult to
| do rather than taking advantage of users in some way.
| Still, if we don't oppose these practices there will never
| be a change, so it's worth fighting for our rights as
| users.
| hyperadvanced wrote:
| This is exactly correct. See distinction between "best
| produced videos" and "best YOUTUBE" videos - it's not about
| making the best video, it's about making the one that
| minmaxes the metrics
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| Youtube needs a metric to not promote low quality videos
| with low intentionality. No one searches for Mr beast
| videos with intent to watch them. The audience is primarily
| children who will watch whatever slop the algorithm puts in
| front of them. We need something like china where
| algorithms push quality educational content.
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| > The audience is primarily children
|
| Ask me how I know you didn't read the handbook! Over 50%
| of the audience is >=25
| montag wrote:
| Mr. Beast is FAR from the most pathological content on
| YouTube.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| > - Dyson's some batteries are notorious for killing
| themselves via firmware on slight cell imbalance instead of
| doing self-balancing. Dyson prioritize "steady income via
| killing good parts early" instead of "building the best
| vacuum possible".
|
| Any good alternatives?
| bayindirh wrote:
| If you really want a Dyson, a better firmware:
| https://github.com/tinfever/FU-Dyson-BMS
|
| If you are OK on alternatives, YouTube channel ProjectFarm
| has some vacuum reviews.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| Mine doesn't seem to have any problem with batteries.
| Just "airways blocked" error no matter what I do and the
| warranty/support service isn't very helpful. So I'm
| looking for a similar-or-better quality clone (cordless
| vacuum with the laser thing) but with better service.
| esaym wrote:
| I went down the vacuum rabbit hole a few years ago. I
| decided on Sebo. These are more or less big ugly machines
| with a cord, but you can buy every part online no matter
| how small (screws, gaskets,etc) or big (motors, control
| boards, etc).
| itishappy wrote:
| Riccar, Miele, SEBO. Brands you may not have heard of (I
| know I hadn't). Highly recommend a visit to your local
| vacuum repair store. Talk to the guy who's job is fixing
| all the shitty stick vacs.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Not to stan for Dyson, but they're not a vacuum-cleaner
| company, they're a fire-prevention company. Every
| decisionmaking process they undertake is going to have that
| at the top of the list. They don't want a lot of batteries
| in the field that are being stretched to the limits of
| their operating lives.
|
| Of course, the company's best response to that concern
| would be to make the batteries easily replaceable,
| including by third-party products. But that's where job #2
| comes in: make sure the consumer has to buy a new Dyson
| sooner rather than later.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Then why design batteries with built-in cell balancing
| support, and remove the resistors to disable the feature
| in the last moment?
|
| You can safely say that if the battery pack's total
| capacity drops under 75%, disable it, or detect dead
| cells and take action.
|
| Disabling life prolonging features while having a full
| MCU and a nice battery IC on board smells fishy to me.
| corford wrote:
| I swapped to Shark and haven't looked back. Current one
| takes an absolute beating (masses of dog hair, kids mess,
| countryside dirt walked into the house etc. etc.) and still
| performs perfectly after 3+ years of almost daily (ab-)use
| physhster wrote:
| DeWalt, or any other power tool battery adapter like this:
| https://www.amazon.com/HICOPEET-Compatible-
| Motorhead-v7-v8/d...
|
| Power tool batteries have BMS, better chargers, and if you
| have multiple batteries, you get infinite vacuuming powers.
| II2II wrote:
| I suspect the intent was the best for the customer. Like it
| or not, YouTube is the customer here. The viewers are
| YouTube's customers.
| Applejinx wrote:
| I'd say the viewers are YouTube's quatloos.
|
| Advertisers and people seeking behavior modification out of
| populations are YouTube's customers. MrBeast understands
| this. The MrBeast goal is to get and stay #1 at whatever
| YouTube wants, for the purpose of being #1 at whatever
| YouTube wants. That purpose can be any number of things,
| MrBeast doesn't care. It's purpose-agnostic.
| kogus wrote:
| You are not wrong, but I'd suggest that in those cases the
| company prioritized short and medium term profit over the
| long term success of the company. Each of the situations you
| list ended up costing those companies dearly (except maybe
| Dyson?), and today they serve as cautionary tales. So I think
| the original point of "keeping the main thing the main thing"
| stands.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _Some counterpoints:_
|
| The goal would be to be more customer-focused in those cases.
|
| "No one prospers without rendering benefit to others." --
| Tadao Yoshida, founder of YKK zippers,
| https://ykkamericas.com/our-philosophy/
|
| With MrBeast, the "best YOUTUBE video" would be one that
| causes engagement with the viewer throughout the video:
|
| > _The creative process for every video they produce starts
| with the title and thumbnail. These set the expectations for
| the viewer, and everything that follows needs to be defined
| with those in mind. If a viewer feels their expectations are
| not being matched, they'll click away - driving down the
| crucial Average View Duration that informs how much the video
| is promoted by YouTube's all-important mystical algorithms._
|
| You have to both entice the viewer with the thumbnail/title,
| and _meet the expectations_ of the viewer so they continue
| watching.
|
| Your counterexamples are a bunch of instances where the
| company _did not meet customer expectations_.
| someothherguyy wrote:
| > No one prospers without rendering benefit to others
|
| Plenty of counterexamples for this as well. Snake oil
| salesmen, drug dealers, woo peddlers, gurus, politicians,
| grifters, scammers, thieves, and on and on...
| CooCooCaCha wrote:
| I hate that so many people live by "wisdom" that falls
| apart at the slightest scrutiny...
| borroka wrote:
| Our lives are made up of and guided by narratives that
| sound good and just on paper, but are empirically proven
| wrong time and time again. Yet they persist.
|
| Some come from the zeitgeist, others are eternal,
| biblical, and worse, unfalsifiable: "everything happens
| for a reason," "if you're meant to be together, you will
| be together," "just do a good job and you'll get what you
| deserve". The latter was voiced by my postdoc advisor,
| who did not take the time to look at the percentage of
| researchers who did good work but did not get a tenure-
| track position. But perhaps those who did not find jobs
| did not do good enough work, and the charade continues.
| nomel wrote:
| Almost all of his examples are/were failures, by all
| metrics.
|
| Cause and effect requires _observation_ , which means
| there will be a time delay between when a company does
| something shady and when the customers realize the rug
| was pulled out from under them. You can't know a pinto is
| going to blow up before it blows up. Once people
| realized, it almost destroyed the company [1]. The time
| delay between a _correction_ in a company is even longer,
| because it requires another layer of observation.
|
| None of these are proof that the error correction
| mechanism is broken, or that the quote is somehow
| untrue/fragile. Most of the egregious examples of broken
| feedback are those companies that make the red and blue
| politicians multi millionaires by the time they retire,
| usually with no-consequences government contracts.
|
| edit: and, this fails miserably if you don't pay any
| attention to the end goal, which I've seen several times.
|
| [1] https://www.autoweek.com/news/a2099001/ford-100-defec
| tive-pi...
| daymanstep wrote:
| > "No one prospers without rendering benefit to others." --
| Tadao Yoshida
|
| This quote describes how things should be, not how things
| actually are.
| thegrimmest wrote:
| In MrBeast's case, his revenue is directly correlated with
| customer engagement via YouTube's algorithm. I'm sure that
| were it legal, gladiatorial combat would be very popular
| and profitable on YouTube. I suppose one could make an
| argument that it would therefore "beneficial".
|
| In the other aforementioned cases, in absence of an
| algorithm, revenue-generating activity wasn't as well
| correlated with meeting customer expectations. The point is
| that companies will always optimize for their own revenue,
| regardless of how well or poorly their activity meets
| customer expectations.
| mc32 wrote:
| >- Ford didn't fix Pinto's fuel tank, prioritizing cost
| minimization over "best possible car in its class".
|
| This is a nit-pick, but for the record, The Pinto didn't
| explode at higher rates than other similar automobiles, also
| there wasn't an internal Ford Memo, it was an attachment to a
| letter to the NHTSA --but all people remember is the this so
| called "memo" Anyhow a myth was born and it seemingly refuses
| to die. By the numbers:
|
| In 1975-76, the Pinto averaged 310 fatalities a year. But the
| similar-size Toyota Corolla averaged 313, the VW Beetle 374
| and the Datsun 1200/210 came in at 405.
|
| Additional info: https://newmarksdoor.typepad.com/mainblog/20
| 05/07/the_pinto_...
| gdilla wrote:
| What? Literally that's the pint. If your goal is to screw
| over your costumers to maximize profit then the active still
| applies. Depends on what your goals are.
| deaddodo wrote:
| That's not a counterpoint, that's a list of examples of
| exactly what they're saying.
|
| They're not saying make the best _product_ possible, they 're
| saying make the product that sells the most _despite_
| quality.
| ngneer wrote:
| I do not view these as counterpoints. You are making the same
| point, which is that the metric one optimizes for is
| extremely important. MrBeast is solely focused on maximizing
| revenue on the YouTube platform. The examples you cite also
| demonstrate the same exact metric (i.e., profit) in other
| domains. I know HP was in the habit of crippling its printers
| to extract more money, to add to your other examples.
|
| Out of curiosity, what's wrong with Intel? Are you referring
| to their selling more capable parts for more money? If so,
| that does not strike me as a shady practice to maximize
| profits. More like how the best fruit goes for export, where
| it can fetch the most return.
| cwyers wrote:
| A good example here is Betamax. A lot of people lament that
| Betamax lost despite being better on a lot of measures:
| picture quality, etc. But what Betamax wasn't better at than
| VHS was runtime, and an early application of home VCRs was to
| time-shift NFL games, which ran longer than Betamax could
| record. It turns out that the end of NFL games is often the
| most important part, so people bought VHS instead of Betamax.
| So best is not some idealized thing, but depends a lot on
| what exactly you're measuring.
|
| But also... this isn't doing well for Boeing? It's costing
| the money? I don't think Boeing is a template for success.
| kmacdough wrote:
| Well a lot of these aren't counterpoints but rather examples
| of when companies naively followed KPIs to their own
| detriment. Boing has fallen from dominance to a distant
| second, Windows has been steadily losing dominance, Ford's
| darker years were around the Pinto fiasco.
|
| While Microsoft as a whole is still quite strong, Ford and
| Boeing lost significant market position and the losses are
| partially attributed to these very mistakes.
| hartator wrote:
| > Some counterpoints:
|
| Maybe all of these companies succeeded _despite_ these?
| btbuildem wrote:
| > Lawyers finding problems and trying to stop things from
| happening instead of finding solutions. Security blocking
| things and not suggesting alternatives. IT blocking this or
| that instead of trying solve problems, etc.
|
| I think these are clear signs of a dysfunctional organization.
| I want to associate that with company size (larger -> more
| bureaucratic, counter-mission nonsense), but I've also seen
| large companies that don't get caught in these pitfalls. My
| best guess to lay blame would be at inadequate, out of touch,
| need-to-be-fired B.o.D and upper and mid-management deadwood.
| These are the people that propagate such ineffective culture.
|
| I will forever remember the head of IT at my org exclaiming in
| a meeting, "I'm not here to solve problems". Blew my mind at
| the time, but it's emblematic and representative of company
| culture as a whole.
| twojobsoneboss wrote:
| TBF there are orgs at companies whose sole role is to play
| DEFENSE - lawyers, CSO etc... if they deem something too
| risky it IS their job to block it, and then it's up to upper
| management to override them if the situation calls for it.
|
| Now that said they should still try to advance the mission
| within that framework, and not be lazy.
| fishpen0 wrote:
| The most secure company is, of course, the company that
| doesn't exist. Bankrupting your org is certainly the most
| effective way to keep it secure.
|
| Yes, their role is defense, but not insofar as to remove
| the profitability of the organization. In several orgs now
| I've seen the legal team blow contracts and the security
| team break the product and the IT team break development in
| the name of performing their role "correctly".
|
| Brainless box checking is not part of defense, you must be
| willing to critically think about how to fit your role to
| your product or organization's profit motive.
| Hacktrick wrote:
| Not disagreeing with you, can you give and explain one of
| the examples where you have seen this?
| btbuildem wrote:
| Reminds me of the "most secure computer is the one
| encased in a block of concrete at the bottom of the
| ocean".
| ngneer wrote:
| There is a natural tension between these equally
| important roles, especially when folks choose to view
| competing objectives as a zero sum game. I think your
| point of view is one-sided.
| __turbobrew__ wrote:
| I see this all the time. Organizations which are solely
| dedicated to stop things from happening instead of allowing
| things to happen.
|
| One example is a disaster readiness organization which
| mandates that teams cannot deploy code in only a single
| datacenter. What they should really be doing is making it so
| code automatically runs in multiple datacenters.
|
| Facilitate instead of forbid.
| agluszak wrote:
| And the "best YOUTUBE videos possible" are... toxic, useless
| brainrot? (with occasional for-views philanthropy)
|
| These videos are certainly the best in terms of what money they
| can make... but are they any good for their consumers?
| itishappy wrote:
| Who said anything about consumers? I think viewing "the best
| YOUTUBE videos possible" in line with "the best CIGARETTES
| possible" is probably the right framing here.
| GTP wrote:
| Yes, best is always wrt some metric, which here is clearly
| monetary gain.
| javier123454321 wrote:
| What's wrong with making things for others' entertainment?
| The moralization of this is bizarre. Don't like it, don't
| consume it. This man has figured out how to create a
| ridiculous amount of value, whichever way you slice it.
| talldayo wrote:
| What's wrong with asking a homeless person to do an
| embarrassing dance for a $20 bill? That used to be popular
| content on YouTube. Don't like that, don't watch it.
|
| If your most potent defense of Mr. Beast is that he's made
| a lot of money, then he stands due the same scrutiny
| Rockefeller and Carnegie got. I've watched his videos, it's
| not an incorrect conclusion to say that his popularity
| hinges on the "savior complex" present in most of his
| videos. His content revolves around exploiting charity as a
| social phenomenon. He's a wannabe altruist that pockets
| more money than he donates. His business relies on the
| emotional manipulation of a destitute audience.
| javier123454321 wrote:
| 1. I don't think that's an accurate characterization of
| Mr. Beasts' content
|
| 2. > He's a wannabe altruist that pockets more money than
| he donates. That's such a weak case. So he doesn't donate
| everything therefore he's evil or something?
|
| 3. > His content revolves around exploiting charity as a
| social phenomenon. What are you even saying? I'm much
| more utilitarian about it. Is he doing more good than
| harm? The answer is a clear and resounding yes.
| Especially as the 'harm' is labeled: Entertaining kids,
| helping others and filming it, and making money?
|
| I guess this politically correct posturing bothers me
| because most of the people issuing this criticism have
| not had as much impact in people's lives as he has.
| Classic case of armchair thinkers, criticizing people
| doing stuff, and doing so excellently.
|
| At any rate the outrage seems like it would be better
| directed at Pfizer or other corporatocratic corruption
| machines, you know, people doing actual harm. Not a kid
| that figured out how to make money in a new media
| landscape and is using a huge portion of that to uplift
| his community.
| talldayo wrote:
| > I guess this politically correct posturing bothers me
| because most of the people issuing this criticism have
| not had as much impact in people's lives as he has.
|
| Cram it. You can say the same thing about Pfizer, anyone
| criticizing a dictator, or terrible philosophers trying
| to publish self help books for profit. By that logic,
| you're not qualified to defend Mr. Beast either because
| you don't actually understand the causal relationship
| between success and charity. It's nonsense criticism, a
| thought-terminating argument intended to obviate good-
| faith discussion.
|
| Mr. Beast's problem is obvious, _if_ you 're willing to
| look past his marketing. Because at the end of the day,
| he's a business. He uses the same playbook as the most
| abusive monopolies like Apple and Google, laundering his
| reputation as a healthy net positive on society.
| Scratching beneath the surface, people know that he lied
| about how much money he makes, he lied about the cars he
| drives and the house he lives in, and probably lies to
| his employees to prevent them from presenting serious
| competition. Assuming Mr. Beast is, well, smart,
| assigning him as a happy-go-lucky charity cause is
| exactly the sort of outcome he wants. If he was serious
| about charity or altruism, he'd have some grander plan
| than sponsoring game shows and leeching off his
| popularity for profit.
|
| By sincerely believing the image he presents, you
| yourself have been manipulated into thinking he's inert.
| Give him... I dunno, 3 more months? I've forgotten the
| average half-life of lifestyle influencers being ousted
| as racketeers or groomers on YouTube.
| meowface wrote:
| >toxic, useless brainrot
|
| I assumed that's what all his videos were for years and
| hadn't ever watched any (given I am not a child, among other
| reasons), but I gave one a chance out of curiosity and found
| myself surprisingly enjoying some of the competition videos.
| The competitions are often well-designed and adeptly
| narratively structured.
| underlipton wrote:
| His competition and giveaway videos are just the modern
| version of reality TV and game shows, where the draw is the
| horse race and human drama. You might call that "toxic,
| useless brainrot," but personally, I feel like such fare is
| about on the same level as any number of classic novels
| (including pretty much anything authored by a Bronte sister).
| Your enjoyment likely hinges on your level of empathy for the
| people involved, as they're thrown into complex social
| situations with their livelihood at stake, or whatever.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| > Lawyers finding problems and trying to stop things from
| happening instead of finding solutions. Security blocking
| things and not suggesting alternatives. IT blocking this or
| that instead of trying solve problems, etc.
|
| "People who realize the ramifications of the proposed route of
| action beyond 'it makes the number bigger'" finding problems
| and trying to stop things from happening instead of finding
| solutions.
|
| There. Fixed it.
| sanex wrote:
| Ok but the main issue is the stopping things from happening
| instead of finding solutions.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| Some things should be stopped.
|
| For example, locking a dude in a room for days on end with
| no mental health evaluation beforehand to see if he can
| handle the psychological stress that might induce. Or
| having said dude run a marathon on a treadmill without any
| training. Or running illegal lotteries. Or fixing the
| outcomes of game shows.
|
| Some of those things "make the best YouTube video possible"
| but are profoundly abusive at the least and outright
| illegal at worst. If you can't do the video without doing
| those things, _you shouldn 't do the video_ and should
| focus on human factors instead of the money you're missing
| out on, like a person without psycopathy might.
| withinboredom wrote:
| > locking a dude in a room for days on end with no mental
| health evaluation beforehand to see if he can handle the
| psychological stress that might induce. Or having said
| dude run a marathon on a treadmill without any training.
| Or running illegal lotteries. Or fixing the outcomes of
| game shows.
|
| I don't think any of these contestants would be doing it
| with a gun to their head. ergo, they had a choice on
| whether to do it. We don't know whether they were
| informed choices, but I assume they were (giving people
| the benefit of the doubt here).
| KronisLV wrote:
| I think those are references to the Dogpack404 videos:
| https://youtube.com/@DogPack404/videos
|
| They were the ones that stirred up a bunch of
| controversy, but had some former employee experiences in
| them.
|
| I have no idea about he greater situation but I think
| that's what the comment is referencing.
| meowface wrote:
| >For example, locking a dude in a room for days on end
| with no mental health evaluation beforehand to see if he
| can handle the psychological stress that might induce.
|
| Note this is MrBeast doing it to himself:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_CbgLpvH9E
|
| I think that changes the ethics a bit. If he decides to
| potentially psychologically torment himself for his
| channel, I don't think it's a big deal that he didn't
| give himself a mental health evaluation beforehand.
|
| (I'm aware he has a similar video with random contestants
| as well. But either way, I think this particular
| criticism is a little too hand-wringy. It's not being
| forced upon anyone and they can leave at any time.)
|
| IMO the biggest issue is the allegation he rigs some of
| the game shows. That's definitely unethical.
| eldaisfish wrote:
| there is nuance to all things and that nuance is what GP
| is getting at.
|
| What you say is also valid but in between, is a lot of
| grey. For example, should the federal government in your
| country issue standardised IDs to citizens? A lawyer may
| point to privacy regulations and say no but there are
| lots of benefits. If a workaround exists, should we
| simply ignore those benefits?
| aredox wrote:
| So your ideal model of a company is the infinite paperclip
| machine?
| xivzgrev wrote:
| I liked how honest the guide was. There wasn't anything fake
| noble here and a lot of his frustrations I have also felt as a
| people manager - the questions employees ask, making excuses
| when deadlines slip, etc
|
| the job is to make YouTube videos that people click and watch
|
| What gets them to watch and stick is a few things but notably
| wow factor, something crazy they haven't seen before
|
| The bar for wow factor keeps rising
|
| Therefore you need to keep learning driving better and better
| results. Otherwise you are out
|
| You need to take ownership for results to avoid delays at all
| costs.
| jollyllama wrote:
| While I agree with your general sentiment, that doesn't seem
| like a particularly insightful quote, but rather a nebulous
| negative definition. Does the guide mean that "best" is
| balanced blend of all of those? Based on what sibling comments
| are saying, the goal is to make the most popular videos, in
| which case, the guide should say that.
| blackoil wrote:
| It is pretty honest guide on how to succeed at Mr. Beast
| productions. They have their own metrics of success which may
| or may not align with your morals or ideals. It is a
| collection of all their learnings in making the videos.
| dogleash wrote:
| >I see it all the time in large organizations, where different
| teams forget what the goal of the company is and instead get
| hyperfocused on their teams KPI's to the detriment of the
| company as a whole.
|
| I thought it was well understood that this kind of misalignment
| is the cost of someone afraid to admit outloud what the goal
| is.
|
| Mr. Beast, like Hollywood production companies before him, can
| say "don't forget, your job is lowest common denominator slop."
|
| This is hacker news, so take a tech giant (doesn't matter
| which) and imagine what it would mean for leadership to tell
| the rank and file what their actual goals were. For starters it
| would be internally demoralizing, externally scandalous, and
| include mens rea for many of their legal "whoopsie daisies"
| over the years.
| tpmoney wrote:
| > Mr. Beast, like Hollywood production companies before him,
| can say "don't forget, your job is lowest common denominator
| slop."
|
| This feels to me like an intentionally hostile reading of the
| content. I think all of us have had the experience of working
| with a co-worker who is either brilliant but extremely prone
| to going down rabbit holes, or a co-worker who seems to have
| a completely different idea of what we're doing than everyone
| else. "Make the best YouTube videos possible, not the highest
| quality" is the same sentiment behind "eventually you have to
| actually ship your software". It's the same sentiment behind
| the derision in the term "architecture astronaut". It's the
| same sentiment behind the "worse is better" axiom. It's the
| same sentiment behind "don't let perfect be the enemy of
| good". In other words you need to know what it is that pays
| your bills and be laser focused on delivering that. A YouTube
| channel isn't the place to make art house silent films. A
| community theater production isn't the place to practice your
| improv comedy skills. If your company sells a database, it's
| not the place to be writing memory safe shells in rust to
| replace bash, no matter how annoying maintaining your startup
| bash scripts are.
| dogleash wrote:
| > intentionally hostile reading of the content.
|
| Why? I specifically mentioned Hollywood to try avoid the
| rose colored glasses and just skip to the matter of fact
| stage. If it's just churning out content then it's just
| churning out content.
|
| > Liz Lemon (friendly, trying to gain favor): Whatcha guys
| working on?
|
| > Ritchie (Deadpan): Piece for the Today Show about how
| next month is October.
| tpmoney wrote:
| Because "lowest common denominator slop" is a culturally
| contextual judgement of media, and varies from place to
| place, time to time and culture to culture. Fine French
| Dining fans would call a pizza parlor "lowest common
| denominator slop", but no one would be offended if the
| employee handbook for a pizza place said "You're here to
| make the BEST TASTING PIZZA. Not the best looking pizza.
| Not a pizza made from the most expensive artesian
| ingredients. Not the fanciest pizza. Not a pizza lovingly
| hand crafted with dough that was hand massaged by virgins
| under the light of a full moon. If it's not making the
| BEST TASTING PIZZA, it's not your job."
| PedroBatista wrote:
| It's code for: "Your goal is to make this company the most
| MONEY possible"
|
| Given the current landscape of crass hype beasts with all the
| peacocking vs the "follow your heart" microaggressions crowd
| it's easy to see those texts were written, but just like
| today's "tech company's" that "invent" things that existed for
| decades already, this is nothing new and it's a sign of a
| culture with very little oversight based on smoke and mirrors.
| Ironically this is exactly what the distilled core of
| "Corporate America" is and we all know what "results at all
| costs" lead to: See Wall Street, Boeing, etc.
|
| Personally I never cared for the guy, it always looked
| tremendously fake and dishonest to me, to to each each own. IMO
| there is nothing new o special about this case, there are
| little dramas like these all over millions of organizations
| around the World.
| Hacktrick wrote:
| While I agree with you, his goal is probably to make the most
| money. But I understand why he might not have phrased it that
| way. For any company their final goal is obviously to make
| the most money possible. But this goal is kind of unclear.
| It's better to approximate it like Mr. Beast does through
| saying that he makes the best YOUTUBE videos.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| >> Your goal here is to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible.
|
| > Replace "youtube videos" with whatever the company is trying
| to achieve.
|
| I see a lot of unnecessary negative sentiment towards that
| quote.
|
| The quote has no hidden meaning and should be taken on face
| value: I could easily see an up-and-coming producer work for
| Mr. Beast, and get sidetracked with making sure that pixels are
| "perfect." Or a set designer making sure that a specific prop
| is placed "perfectly." That's not the point, and Mr. Beast is
| very upfront about it.
|
| I actually admire that quote.
| talldayo wrote:
| As a reductive/regressive philosophy, I don't think this
| works though. In terms of YouTube, "the best" video you can
| make is probably porn that's softcore enough to not trip the
| monetization or age restriction gates. Without at least a
| _little_ set dressing, Mr Beast 's image would be as a
| opportunistic carny that records his exploits for ad revenue.
| His goal _isn 't_ to create the best YouTube videos, though,
| because that would be self-destructive. Ultimately, and
| perhaps more cynically, his goal is to groom his reputation
| as an altruist philanthropist so that he can continue to
| profit from his audience's suspended disbelief.
|
| This guide is about how to succeed as a servile employee,
| _not_ how to maximize your potential as a YouTuber or
| entrepreneur. The way people are cargo-culting this document
| is a dangerous habit of mimicry without understanding
| rhetoric or the context in which it was written. Following
| the advice in this PDF is not a royal road to Mr. Beast 's
| level of success, "leaked" or otherwise.
| rwmj wrote:
| I was glad to see such a clear, actionable mission statement.
| At companies I've worked for, the mission statements have been
| either absurdly broad or completely incomprehensible, and as a
| result most employees (quite rightly) ignore them.
| pjlegato wrote:
| > teams forget what the goal of the company is and instead get
| hyperfocused on their teams KPI's
|
| This is the intractable and unavoidable problem with the use of
| KPIs as a management tool: Goodhart's Law -- any metric used as
| a target ceases to be a good measure.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
|
| You are -- literally -- telling the team, "go make this KPI
| number go up. Your entire job performance will be evaluated on
| that basis." It is unsurprising that the team therefore focuses
| on making that number go up.
|
| If you want teams to consider the goals of the company, or
| anything at all besides their KPIs, don't use KPIs.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| _Lawyers finding problems and trying to stop things from
| happening instead of finding solutions. Security blocking
| things and not suggesting alternatives. IT blocking this or
| that instead of trying solve problems, etc._
|
| Legit, but you're not thinking this all the way through. As an
| organization grows you'll have people whose primary duty is
| risk mitigation, without the executive authority to pick up the
| phone and spend resources on implementing, identifying, or
| seeking a solution. Indeed, if they spend too much time
| solutioneering, it will limit their ability to do the job they
| were hired for. Then they get punished for going too far. The
| sort of initiative-taking and ownership that works great in a
| startup can get someone fired in a larger org.
| morgango wrote:
| Hey! Have you been reading my email? This is a perfect analogy
| of the medium-to-large business that I work for.
| Arch-TK wrote:
| I appreciate this is how a startup must run, but must every small
| tech company be a startup? Where do you find jobs for small
| companies which are just happy to exist and grow sustainably.
| Where you can come in at 9:00am, have an uninterrupted hour long
| lunch break at 12:00pm and stop working at 5:30pm? While also not
| being paid pennies? I can care about your company and be
| passionate about my work without having to sacrifice all
| semblance of any aspect of the rest of my life. If that makes me
| a "B" or "C" player then that's fine.
| Centigonal wrote:
| They exist, but they are rare. Large tech companies have the
| benefit of economies of scale. For what you're looking for, you
| really need to find a niche player, and those folks don't hire
| very often. OpenDental, Rogue Amoeba, Impexium, and Cronometer
| are a few.
| dbbk wrote:
| I've seen these be referred to as "calm companies" which is
| nice.
| vitorbaptistaa wrote:
| Would anyone be kind enough to download the PDF and upload it
| somewhere for us, Brazilians without VPNs? :)
| bandedetrappes wrote:
| There you go ! https://we.tl/t-Vn9dG1qWRU
| sunaookami wrote:
| Here is the link to the PDF from the tweet:
| https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YaG9xpu-WQKBPUi8yQ4HaDYQLUS...
| jonplackett wrote:
| Not really sure why it's linked to X anyway. The X post is just
| a link to google docs.
|
| https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YaG9xpu-WQKBPUi8yQ4HaDYQLUS...
| codedokode wrote:
| Interesting, I only learned about this Youtuber recently, maybe 2
| months ago or so despite him having so many views. Youtube seems
| to be good at not showing you what you don't search for.
|
| What his videos are lacking in my opinion is the quality of
| scenario and planning. They build an expensive set, give away a
| large prize but the challenges are either too simple or not very
| creative. Too little challenges, too little competition, too
| little motivation, too little expressing of personality like
| mutual help, sacrificing or betrayal, too little unexpected
| scenario twists. In this aspect they are not as good as TV shows.
| As an extreme example, take "give away money to random people"
| series. What fun is in getting money for nothing? And watching
| that is probably 100x more boring.
| whiterknight wrote:
| Billions of views and total YouTube dominance disagree with
| you.
| anamexis wrote:
| No, they're not exclusive at all. As the guide itself says:
|
| > Your goal here is to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible.
| That's the number one goal of this production company. It's
| not to make the best produced videos. Not to make the
| funniest videos. Not to make the best looking videos. Not the
| highest quality videos.. It's to make the best YOUTUBE videos
| possible.
|
| You can get billions of views and total YouTube dominance
| without making particularly engaging content, and I think
| that's the interesting point here.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| It does not define best.
|
| Best revenue? Best profit margin? Best viewed?
| anamexis wrote:
| They spell it out pretty clearly in the PDF.
|
| > The three metrics you guys need to care about is Click
| Thru Rate (CTR), Average View Duration (AVD), and Average
| View Percentage (AVP).
|
| > How to measure the success of content
|
| > Like I said at the start of this the metrics you care
| about in regards to virality are CTR, AVD, and AVP. If
| you want to know if the contents of a video are good,
| just look at the AVD and AVP of a video after we upload
| it.
| mettamage wrote:
| I feel it's more that the average person likes to watch
| something simple sometimes, myself included
| aswegs8 wrote:
| Keep in mind that you are not the target audience. Also:
|
| "Our audience is massive and because of that you have to be
| simple, for 50 million people to understand something it must
| be simple."
| 4star3star wrote:
| I find his stuff sloppy and uninteresting, too, and he has no
| charisma. This just goes to show that he really does know what
| he's doing. He identified the statistically meaningful things
| to focus on and perfect. Imagine if he was just the producer
| for someone who actually gave a crap about making quality
| content.
| corry wrote:
| MrBeast - an OG Founder Mode guy?
|
| I'll leave it to you all to debate the ethics of MrBeast's
| videos, YouTube, and the questionable value of these videos.
|
| Meanwhile, the most fascinating part of this is a glimpse into a
| new kind of media company, where he instituted a particular
| process and approach and scaled it up outside of the initial set
| of producers.
|
| You get the sense he's flying by the seat of his pants into a
| whole new world, and he's creating the org and the processes on
| the fly based on what's been successful so far.
|
| The energy, drive and enthusiasm required to create a new model
| of not only "product" (even one that solely exists to please the
| algorithm) and company is fascinating.
|
| There are more parallels to startup founders than one might
| admit.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| > There are more parallels to startup founders than one might
| admit.
|
| It is a startup and he is a founder. There are no parallels, he
| is simply an example. His video production company is very
| similar to other entertainment companies catering to the same
| audience like roblox (studios) or mobile gaming startups in
| general.
| corry wrote:
| Fair, I should have said "tech founders" I suppose. I think
| it's reasonable to draw distinctions between tech, media,
| clothing, retail, etc startups.
|
| Like, MrBeast seems like a media startup which is different
| than, say, a SaaS startup or an AI assistant startup. Fair
| enough?
| m1ck wrote:
| https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/d964dd8c-047e-4b02-bb....
| darby_nine wrote:
| I can't be the only person disturbed by the penetration of terms
| like "obsession" into nominally professional culture. You should
| not be asking your employees to qualify for DSM symptoms just to
| not get fired (with severance, lol, that is genuinely a step up
| from nothing even if it's clearly meant to soften the
| psychological shock of reading about A- B- and C- employees).
| mdgrech23 wrote:
| this is why we need unions.
| quailfarmer wrote:
| in order to disallow obsessive work?
| chucksmash wrote:
| "Obsession" predates the DSM and psychiatry as a profession.
| darby_nine wrote:
| You'll find that most undesirable human behavior and
| perception does. This is just "product obsession" marketing
| bullshit forced onto real-life relationships. If you want to
| engage in this type of culture because it helps you fit in
| with founders; fine, that's your own brain you're messing
| with. Don't force it on others.
| chucksmash wrote:
| > Don't force it on others.
|
| Nobody is forcing anything on anybody here so there's no
| need to end your thought with a defiant coda.
|
| > If you want to engage in this type of culture because it
| helps you fit in with founders; fine, that's your own brain
| you're messing with.
|
| You misunderstand the objection I hinted at. Which is fine.
| I'm not pro-"marketing bullshit" because it's not an
| either/or choice. What I object to is taking a perfectly
| normal word someone uses and then choosing a narrow,
| fraught, medical interpretation of the word to ascribe to
| them a viewpoint of, essentially, "they want you to be
| mentally ill!"
| p_j_w wrote:
| So does schizophrenia.
| xwowsersx wrote:
| You may not find it appealing, but the truth is that most major
| successes are driven by obsession. It's not a balanced or
| psychologically sound way to live--no one claims it is. If you
| believe great achievements come from people working regular
| hours, taking it slow, and maintaining a comfortable pace, you
| are mistaken.
|
| Newton, Steve Jobs, Marie Curie...the list goes on. These
| people's success wasn't a product of balance or moderation
| darby_nine wrote:
| > You may not find it appealing, but the truth is that most
| major successes are driven by obsession.
|
| Great, don't force it on your employees. I am not working for
| you for anything other than a paycheck and flexible working
| conditions and stimulating work.
| humanizersequel wrote:
| Nobody is forcing you to work for Mr Beast
| darby_nine wrote:
| > Nobody is forcing you to work for Mr Beast
|
| No, being unemployed is the coercive factor here. It's
| not fair to treat at-will employment as non-coercive
| unless non-employment is actually zero. Non-employment
| currently stands at about 7.7%: https://www.richmondfed.o
| rg/research/national_economy/non_em...
|
| Why would anyone turn down a chance to make a living if a
| job is offered? Why do you think the fed ensures that
| there are never enough jobs for everyone? Why do you
| think the fed and the business world talks about the
| economy in terms of "jobs" and "unemployment" when these
| are metrics largely unrelated to stuff like "am I
| actually getting a fair wage" and "is housing priced
| anywhere near rationally"? etc--the non-coercive labor
| market is a complete illusion.
| Dansvidania wrote:
| i would argue the communication registry of influencer/youtuber
| culture skews superlative.
|
| meaning i would translate obsession -> dedication in common
| language.
|
| The only information about this obsession in the document is
| about learning, and there is a specific mention that people are
| judged based on results and not hours, so I am willing to say
| that this language is much less alarming than what I heard in
| my experience in startups.
| andyish wrote:
| This sounds like it's all been paraphrased from the old Netflix
| HR document that compared itself to a professional sports team.
| mritchie712 wrote:
| congrats to Simon here. This post is ranking well for a lot of
| terms people will be searching for.
| Pr0ject217 wrote:
| https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/e524204e4b97c7eb607eea67...
| hi-v-rocknroll wrote:
| So what really turned me off to this guy was his smarmy ~2019
| campaign that also damaged my view of otherwise sensible
| Youtubers who shilled for him without thinking carefully. As
| such, pretending to save the planet while failing at math, logic,
| and physics because getting rich and being a internet->real
| celebrity are oh so much more important(tm) than emotionally and
| financially exploiting your audience or doing what you say you're
| going to do. _sigh_
|
| "#TeamTrees vs. REALITY" (2019, Phil Mason)
| https://youtu.be/gqht2bIQXIY
| meindnoch wrote:
| Why did you think he was supposed to save the planet? He
| clearly wrote in the document that the goal is to make the best
| YOUTUBE videos. Not saving the planet or any other bullshit
| that he puts in the videos. If the numbers showed that the best
| YOUTUBE videos could be made by torturing third-world infants
| to death, then he would torture third-world infants to death.
| Because that would be how you get the best YOUTUBE videos.
| jhwhite wrote:
| > I want you to look them in the eyes and tell them they are the
| bottleneck and take it a step further and explain why they are
| the bottleneck so you both are on the same page.
|
| I've always wanted to be able to tell people they're the
| bottleneck. I've had talks with management about this. "We need
| to tell people bluntly so they understand the impact they're
| having."
|
| Nope, it could hurt a relationship and relationship is more
| important than delivering.
|
| I don't want to be an ass, but I do love this approach by Mr.
| Beast.
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| I feel the same, but I realized I don't want to be the blunt
| person; I just want some other blunt person to do my dirty
| work. This is not really a fair expectation for me to have.
|
| That said I feel like having people who are constructively
| blunt in your organization can make all the difference. If you
| listen to stories about successful managers and CEOs it often
| comes down to bluntness.
|
| It can also go the other way though. Being blunt while lacking
| in other areas (technical knowledge, judgment, vision, ethics)
| will just add toxicity.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| It seems like the last several months have seen a trickle of
| information being leaked since the recent scandals involving
| Chris Tyson and some video series from former employees
| "exposing" the channel as basically scripted reality TV (I
| thought that was already well known, it's pretty obvious if you
| spend more than a few minutes watching it).
|
| What Donaldson has done is effectively hack the Youtube
| algorithm, and as a hobby content creator for the last 10 years
| or so, I find it has been absolutely destructive to the "content"
| world. He's absolutely right - you're not trying to make the best
| content, or the best video, or whatever - you're trying to make
| the best YOUTUBE video, implicitly admitting what youtube floats
| to the top of recommendation algorithms is NOT any of those
| things. It's hyper optimized to be as addictive and as least
| satiating mentally as possible, it's entertainment junk food. At
| least old-school reality TV had semi interesting people on it.
|
| It's just very saddening for me to watch the "beastification" of
| youtube and the overall creator space. I make content because _I_
| like making it. I make the content _I_ would like to watch. It 's
| secondary to me whether anyone else enjoys it, and that kind of
| creative spirit is absolutely gone on the web, and I completely
| believe content quality has suffered from it. To some degree the
| audience is the problem for demanding it, as sibling comments
| have pointed out, but I think this is blaming the victim a bit.
| Youtube also pushes these addicting videos out to people and
| highly incentivizes it. It'd be like handing out cigarettes at
| the hospital and blaming the subset of people that get addicted.
| Sure, it's their fault, but the hospital probably shouldn't be
| doing that in the first place.
| yeukhon wrote:
| The abuse and toxic workplace had been exposed a few years back
| but nobody took those allegations seriously
| vermaat wrote:
| Nice! Looks similarly written like a LLM prompt to carefully
| instruct people. It even includes the tipping haha
| qzx_pierri wrote:
| It seems impossible to reach great success without someone trying
| to tear you down.
| kart23 wrote:
| > and of course, more money then you could ever dream of making
| at any other company.
|
| I didn't really find anything in the pdf outrageous except this
| line.
| methods21 wrote:
| Reads like a "How to PM" and "Extreme Ownership" rolled into 1
| doc.
|
| The one area that I'm wondering a bit on is the statement that
| you need to be working on multiple 'videos' aka projects at 1
| time and if your not then your a FAILURE... so whose priority
| list is "prio" when, lets say, you are working on 5-10 projects?
| And they all have prios/emergencies etc.... Interesting
| expectation setting here. And concludes with a rather harsh
| statement too with the "failed as a MrBeast employee that day"...
|
| For reference: Work on multiple videos EVERYDAY Please do not
| come in and only work on one video during a workday. That's how
| you fall behind on future videos and create a nasty cycle that
| i'm trying to stop. If you drop everything and go all in on a
| video for 3 days then that's 3 days your other videos will fall
| behind and eventually you'll have to drop other videos to focus
| on those videos and it will snowball into you can't do anything
| but focus on what's right in front of you because you murdered
| any lead time you had. If you ever only work on one video during
| a day, you failed as a MrBeast employee that day
| eezing wrote:
| Never really occurred to me why Mr. Beast content doesn't appeal
| to me (nor have I thought about it much)... their sole purpose is
| CTR. Makes sense. Lame.
| ThePowerOfFuet wrote:
| Saved you four clicks:
|
| https://drive.usercontent.google.com/download?id=1YaG9xpu-WQ...
| anonu wrote:
| This is no different than the high performance culture that comes
| at top-notch firms or startups. The main difference between
| working for MrBeast and working at a startup is that at least
| what "high performance" means is codified in this 40-page manual.
| There's a lot of value in this document regardless of what you
| think of Youtube, MrBeast videos and the general place these
| videos have in our cultural zeitgeist.
| sylviangth wrote:
| How do you guys find employees/founding team members who actually
| value results over hours worked just like MrBeast?
|
| At this point I'm convinced any great company follows this same
| principle. I also strongly believe in this in my startup.
|
| But I've been finding it super hard to find employees or founding
| team members with this kind of mindset.
|
| How do you spot these people?
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