Many people are ignoring some interesting aspects of Mr. Beasts business and instead are focusing on the content which is mostly attention grabbing, silly, ridiculous game show premises. The content isn't for me or likely many HNers but I see similarities with startups and his business model.
From watching a couple of interviews, things I've picked up - when his youtube videos were grossing $20-30k a month he started hiring people and said he hires about 1 person per month since then. He has a teams of accountants, editors, producers, etc. He decided early on to have videos translated but would hire premier voice actors in countries, like someone that voice acted Batman to do his voice. He has an obsessed culture of making the best videos. He built a huge studio and lives there.
I see many similarities to what I've read about startup founders and a growth mindset. If anything, there are some huge marketing lessons to be learned from how he runs his business. I would love to see an experienced interviewer with knowledge of the business world/startups interview him.
My kid made me listen to the whole joe rogan interview with him. It was very insightful. Maybe rogan isn't "an experienced interviewer with knowledge of the business world/startups" in some people's mind, but I thought he covered many issues well.
This was also an interesting and fun interview which I expected to skip over fairly quickly but ended up listening to in the entirety.
Some discussion over how you would lose something like 3% of viewers if somebody sneezed, went to the toilet, and so on.. Other things to avoid, like any signalling that the video is winding down will lose you a huge chunk of viewers instantly.
Yeah the interview I saw a clip out of he or a staffer stated that any mention of peeing would drop viewership.
I watch woodworking youtubers and a couple of them had a behind the scenes discussion about their channels and also came to the conclusion that any wind-down loses viewers and this affects a channel. The algorithms use metrics of how long someone watches so it makes sense to end abruptly rather than have 30-60s of wind down.
Mr Beast's team must have second by second analytics on every video to know what works, what doesn't for the types of videos they produce.
This is another great exemple of the YT algorithm making the experience of watching videos inferior in the name of profit and attention grabbing by the way.
The reason YT doesn’t want show to wind down is because it provides people with a nice and natural place to stop watching which is nice. The race towards shorter, easier, more catchy and relentless content is a race to the bottom making everyone dumber.
Watching TikTok for an hour is probably the most depressing experience I ever had when it comes to my general opinion of humanity. Yet I’m here commenting and I’m not convinced that it is a better use of my time than TikTok. Sometimes I wonder if what the internet has actually done to us was worth it.
On the one hand YouTube can tweak the algorithm at any time and stop rewarding sudden endings (anybody thinking of Michael Ellis? How about a sudden ending?)
On the other hand, think about what benefits the platform. Executing a sudden ending that leaves people engaged and ready to continue to watch, rather than a friendly sign-off that gives people permission to go about their day like a healthy human being?
YouTube inherently will be strongly motivated to keep people connected and watching, rather than happy or healthy. So it's got me wondering about sign-offs that might invoke this reality. I'll have other videos, the viewer is not guaranteed to go from mine to a MrBeast video. If I wanted to be cagey about it I could try to connect to another video of mine: I've seen this done by others.
It makes sense if you assume that YouTube will reward you for keeping the viewer from switching off, through and beyond the end of your video. You become complicit in an attention engine, with some known parameters: you are there to keep people watching. What you do isn't relevant. You could be helping or hurting them, whatever you like, so long as you keep people on YouTube, and whatever YouTube does for metrics or algorithms, you can be sure that keeping people tuned in is an existential need of theirs and you'll always be rewarded for directing people to more YouTube. of ANY kind. Doesn't have to be the latest MrBeast. If you can successfully direct people to any other video of your choice, yours or otherwise, that still counts.
>I would love to see an experienced interviewer with knowledge of the business world/startups interview him.
It doesn't fully match your requirements but Mr. Beast was on Joe Rogan a few months ago. A fantastic interview and they talk a lot about the stuff you mention (voice actors, hiring people, etc.)
Just this week he did a one hour interview with 'The iced coffee hour' (I think that's the name of the channel), and he goes really into details about his revenue streams, costs, his plans for the future etc. Really interesting
He mentioned that he pulls almost no revenue and reinvests the money he makes into the next video. He started off with a $10k sponsorship - and he just gave it all away to a homeless person. And this cycle just keeps getting bigger. So yes, very much a growth mindset.
> "Whenever I watch these videos I’m awed and scared at the lengths to which humans in the twenty-first century will go to slurp up the drips of unimaginable wealth that the algorithm leaks out through Mr. Beast."
That's it, isn't it? It's the exact opposite of dignity of labour: it's compensation for degradation. The "voluntary" part is just highlighting how willing people are to trade in unnecessary misery for the entertainment of the comfortable.
On many levels I agree with you. But, you can also look at this thru the paradigm of the "hero's journey". A normal person, plucked from the masses is given a harrowing mission. If they survive, there is glory ($$$), if not, then there is failure (Internet ridicule).
Granted, Mr. Beast is not giving us the story of Luke Skywalker, but I can understand the rational of the person taking the challenge.
For most people watching, it's just torture porn, but content providers have to give the people what they want to make a buck....
Yes, but the difference here is that the mission is inherently unnecessary. Consider the JFK speech and what went before choosing to go to the moon:
"But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?"
Perhaps we've conquered all the naturally "hard" things and are left only with artificial challenges to inflict on ourselves and others. Climbing the highest mountain for the first time has a kind of natural "because it's there" dignity to it. But it's become a littered tourist spot now.
> torture porn, but content providers have to give the people what they want to make a buck
Someone could quite easily write 1k words on what the word "porn" is doing in that sentence and how it relates to desire, suffering and spectacle.
The other difference is that anyone can do them. I don't think you could have competitions about things that are at all useful and necessary that are accessible to everyone.
All missions are kind of unnecessary. Youtubes entire mission is unnecessary, it's nothing but entertainment and some education. Mr. Beasts videos clearly provide a lot of people with joy considering how many subscribers he has. Hard for me to say he's not providing value to those people.
Can’t agree. Things that people will pay for are by definition valuable, and that value makes them good. Now obviously we have to consider harm, if there’s more harm than value the goodness is wiped out, but I see very little harm in these videos. It’s a win win win for everyone involved.
> but content providers have to give the people what they want to make a buck...
Modern entertainment really is a blight. At least when I was a kid public TV was making shows which were both entertaining and trying to uplift people. There is something slightly despicable about this race to the bottom mentality if that’s what people want, we are not guilty of feeding them garbage.
Where's the dignity of working in a coal mine and getting black lung, the dignity of lifting heavy things all day and living with chronic pain through your later years, the dignity of fulfilling inane requests from rude customers?
Far too often the idea of dignity is used to repress people who are simply busting their ass for someone else to afford a meager lifestyle.
There's some dignity in doing something that has a point. Doesn't negate the need for better, safer working conditions and good pay but there's a big psychological difference between digging coal (which you know will go on to heat homes) and sitting in a circle and having the internet laugh at you.
Creating content that millions will enjoy in exchange for six figures of cash is something that has a point.
The internet wasn't laughing at that dude.
I assume most people here are too good to watch Mr Beast /this video and are simply inserting into it whatever is most convenient to their argument.
The dude is amazing. It was a fun enough video. His family is beautiful and watching how he "survived" based on the strength of his love of family was great.
I was hoping to find a Nye Bevan (former coal miner and inventor of the NHS) quote on the subject, but alas I can't. I will just note that a lot of early 20th century labour organising was built around not eradicating such work but making it appropriately compensated, safe, and respected.
Certainly, some labor is suffering, but what it actually means is to put forth effort. To some people, any effort put forth is suffering, but that's certainly not always the case. Laboring on behalf of something you believe in deeply can be joyful. If you really have never experienced this, I urge you to change your habits and try to find a way to do things that you can take joy in.
agree —- i kept waiting for the author to spend more time on the indignity and exploitation Mr. Beast is dispensing. there are desperate people out there that will leap at a chance for this much cash. how long until we see a Mr. Beast version of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Running_Man_(King_novel) (the arnold movie is ultra cheesey and fun too)
This blogger is acting like traditional network television has never mentally tortured people for our viewing pleasure. Have they never seen an episode of Hell's Kitchen, Dr Phil, I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here or Big Brother? Basically the entire reality TV genre is based on that premise.
Edit: Seeing as they mention Joe Rogan, Fear Factor is another great example of a reality TV version of basically the same thing.
> This blogger is acting like traditional network television has never mentally tortured people for our viewing pleasure. Have they never seen an episode of Hell's Kitchen, Dr Phil, I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here or Big Brother? Basically the entire reality TV genre is based on that premise.
Contestants on the reality TV show "The Island with Bear Grylls" get lightly starved. And if you get to the final round of "SAS: Who Dares Wins" you get to be lightly tortured (kept awake, loud music, people shouting at you, bound, blindfolded..). (But they do have medics on hand at least...)
The show "Alone" is pretty much a starving contest. In recent years contestants have started packing on weight prior to filming so they can rely more on fat stores when their food supply dwindles. Typically one or two contestants a season get pulled for medical reasons due to excessive weight loss.
Also radio. In 2007, Jennifer Strange died after drinking 2 gallons of water, in response to a KDND morning show that ran a contest called "Hold your wee for a Wii".
And a lot of people look at these "torture" situations as a battle of wills. Nobody is truly being tortured and they aren't really in a dangerous situation (generally). Fear factor is a mix of scary and disgusting, with an audience watching and thinking, "yes, no, yes, not for all the money in the world, maybe, yes".
it’s just not at all worth that much money to put yourself through this awful torture. how long will $50k last you in the US? it’s ridiculous. the person who voiced the “AI” was probably paid more
It’s a contest so people are going to be willing to endure more torture the larger the prize. One self limiting option might be to pay per day and decrease the amount every day split amount the remaining contestants.
>Their strict standards resulted in content that was homogeneous and boring, but safe. It’s terrifying that a man spent one hundred days in a small circle in an empty field.
This isn't terrifying. People do much worse for 100x less. Prostitution and porn, for example, many times drive people to suicide. People stay on ships for months at a time without seeing their family, not too long ago, sailors would go years on ships. Why? For money. The author wants to live in a world where everyone gets everything at no cost: that isn't even admiribale, it's childish.
> The author wants to live in a world where everyone gets everything at no cost: that isn't even admiribale, it's childish.
Why is it childish to want a life in which you don’t need to labor to have everything you need to be happy? It’s childish to think that human beings are born worthy of a happy peaceful safe life? Why do we need to earn those things? Are they not inherent within us?
Because at the end of the day you need to obtain food, clothing, shelter and other necessities to even survive to the next day, not even mentioning doing anything for pleasure. Either through labor of your own, or by doing labor to earn money to buy these for you possibly your family. Thinking that "human beings are born worthy of a happy peaceful safe life" is childish - the world doesn't owe us anything, and if we want to continue living on it we have to earn it.
It’s a challenging time in human history because we’re now capable of producing enough food, clothing, shelter, and other necessities for every human on Earth. That will only get more true as population growth slows while innovation continues to drive productivity improvements.
But we’re still culturally in the mindset you’re describing: that we must each individually wrest life out of the wilderness day by day.
As a result we seem to be inventing more and more complex and bizarre ways of forcing that reality to still exist. Like pointless YouTube challenge videos done solely to provide ad inventory so well-off people can sell things to other well-off people.
We aren't inventing more and more complex ways of forcing that reality to still exist. That reality does still exist, it's close to not existing, maybe only another 300-400 years, but it's still 100% true right now. You are ignoring the massive logistical challenge of getting all those things to all those people and spreading all that knowledge to get production happening. Additionally, our current system is built on a 100 leaning towers of pisa. Look at Ukraine, it gets invaded and our global supply of food is massively impacted, many people are going to starve and freeze to death over the war in Ukraine this winter who have never set foot in Ukraine or Russia.
>we’re now capable of producing enough food, clothing, shelter, and other necessities for every human on Earth
This should come with a footnote that it's only possible due to slave labor in third world countries. A much smaller subset of people would be buying iPhones if they were $5000.
"It’s a challenging time in human history because we’re now capable of producing enough food, clothing, shelter, and other necessities for every human on Earth."
But that's only true with incentive to work.
Their point wasn't anything to do with wilderness. It was if you had your needs met without the requirement of work, that a significant portion of people would not work. Without those workers, we would no long have enough production.
This is only happening because more women are working. Guess what happens when all men and women are free all day long? It comes from the very essence of evolution that when the carrying capacity increases the population rises until it reaches the new one. Any "utopia" would revolve around sex as it is the principal object of human existence and reality.
There is no shortage of ways to devalue labor though. We all know people who work and would be not rich but prosperous enough, if not the economy system they live in held them hostage. Arguing that income disparity is their fault is neither humane nor logical. Childish is an expectation that people must spend their childhood, teen age or adult mental health on learning hard how to dig themselves out of a pit that they never had a choice not to be born into, when your favorite system at some point makes it adequate for them to present you a knife and to ask for your wallet to just survive, or to participate in a humiliating activity if they have no courage to do the former. It’s up to us to decide how it all should work, not to some trivial natural limitations.
> Thinking that "human beings are born worthy of a happy peaceful safe life" is childish - the world doesn't owe us anything, and if we want to continue living on it we have to earn it.
That's just, like, your opinion, man. But, IRL there are plenty of people that require care-taking, who we never expect any labor from.
It is getting increasingly easier to provide these essentials as time goes on, so why is it unimaginable that there might be a day when those are default, and not something that you need labour for?
Yes, it's increasingly easier. The ratio of (people consuming) / (people producing) has been growing massively. However, it's impossible for (people producing) to reach zero. And, unless (people producing) = 0, there will always be a cost to the goods produced, and (people consuming) has to pay that.
The folks working on farms, few though they are in the modern world, deserve compensation. What will the people not working on the farm do to deserve the fruits of their labor? Whatever it will be, will be work. Same for the folks building houses, and all the rest of modern infrastructure that we depend upon to live.
I don't think anyone is saying we shouldn't compensate people doing labour that is required. I think the problem is that we don't really have a societal model that is doing its hardest to cover these needs first before other ones.
If we used the money we spend on, say, entertainment or high-end mobile phone industry on R&D regarding farms and food yield and distribution we might see lots more advancements in this area. But that's not really something that is desirable in our modern economies; for people in the USA and most of the developed world we don't really need to invest any more in solving hunger because we are really not hungry anymore. And the ones that are hungry we don't really acknowledge as a big problem, although they exist.
Housing on the other hand, it's really interesting to think of this problem because acquiring a house has gotten much more difficult even though our capabilities to build houses have increased so much. This seems to be a problem in how we are deciding the prices of houses rather than a pure "we need to pay for materials and construction costs".
So although these people deserve to be compensated, we are in no way paying the "right" prices. I reckon for food we are actually paying less money than we should be paying for some products (counting externalities that are derived from our current methods of production) and for housing we are paying more than the actual material and labour cost of the construction. All in all, it seems prices and cost of living is kind of whacky in modern societies.
"If we used the money we spend on, say, entertainment or high-end mobile phone industry on R&D regarding farms and food yield and distribution we might see lots more advancements in this area."
There are massive sums invested in agricultural R&D. Some of this does include a focus on poorer markets. We also heavily subsidize many crops to be competitive on the global market, thus exporting to poorer nations (overall that might be a bad thing, stunting their economic growth).
This is the issue. No one needs to do anything to deserve access to food, shelter, clothing, etc.
I think you're framing it something like lazy people vs. people who work hard, which I don't think we need to do. If we ever lived in world where we could all access unlimited food, shelter, etc. then do you think people would still have to do stuff to actually "earn" access to it? Why or why not?
The issue I had in my original comment was that the OP suggested merely _wanting_ to live in that world, where we are all handed the ingredients for a happy life at 0 cost, is childish. I can't fathom thinking that someone wanting to live a happy life without needing to toil is _childish_
They do need to do something though. Why would the farmer work harder than he has to feed his own family? He can produce just enough food for himself and relax. Why would the people building houses build an extra one?
We do not live in a world with unlimited food and shelter.
Yeah I know, I wasn’t saying we do live in that world. I’m continuing to say that _wanting_ to live in that world isn’t childish. Wanting to live in a world where we are all handed food, medicine, shelter, etc. for free seems like something we should all obviously be in favor of achieving eventually. Instead, there seem to be some people who view this ideal as childish, as if even if there are enough resources for everyone, one ought to have to work to earn access to those resources, which just seems cruel and domineering.
The premise that there can be free food and housing, without people having had to work to provide them, is fantasy. Wanting to live in a fantasy is not unreasonably childish, but it is childish.
It is childish to want to fly to America from Europe in 1700 and get upset that it is not possible. That is what I meant: "want" as a present demand, as seen in some dictionaries.[1] I should have been more clear about this as it seems to have become the point of contention. But see my later point about the carying capacity for why this is an unreasonable future want as well.
People aren't born worthy of anything. Thinking otherwise is childish. We need to earn things because they're not unlimited. Living a happy peaceful life means consuming things, if you don't provide things back no one is going to give you anything to consume.
Isn't the point of standing on the shoulders of giants that we should reach farther and greater heights than they ever could? To seek to provide for your children is human - and to provide for others in general is human as well. So what happens when the provisions of the past exceed the demands of the present? Do we grow our demand, as we've done so many times? Or do we seek to alleviate our struggles and strive for growth for it's own sake, rather than for the sake of our own survival? I prefer the 2nd option
I'm not sure what this means. It'd be nice if people had free access to mental health counseling, but guess what, mental health counselors require payment. If you want things you need to work for them. Until robots do everything that will remain reality.
You're mixing two different things. I agree with you - if we could live in a world where we didn't have to work, that's great! That's the desired outcome IMO.
But you also ask:
> Why do we need to earn those things? Are they not inherent within us?
And if I'm understanding correctly, the reason we need to earn these things is because right now, we're not living in a world in which we can stop working. The world doesn't just hand us what we need without toil, unfortunately.
Because if no one had to work, nothing would get done, and we would not have the abundance of food and goods that we do. All that stuff is made by the labor of others.
That's a logistical issue. The point of concern is that the person I was responding to said that merely wanting to live in a world where you are handed everything is childish. Why would wanting to be able to have access to everything you need for a happy life at 0 cost ever be childish?
We are all born worthy of a life free of struggle. If we can ever obtain that, we deserve it, regardless of how hard we worked for it. I don't understand this mindset of "you gotta _earn_ happiness/safety/security, etc."
I can't edit the post anymore, but after reading the comments, taking a break, and comming back to this, I realize that I didn't use the right language here. The tone is too negative and demeaning to the author. Since I felt that the article was unfair to Beast I "attacked back" in this post and that was wrong (perhaps in a way childish). I still hold the main points, but I think the word childish is not a nice word to use and lowers the overall discusion on HN. "Unreasonable" would be better, but the effect is not as good and misses some points in my opinion. But I think the effect shouldn't be the focus here. Attacking the author shouldn't be the priority at all. Childish implies an intelectual defect, and that can't be removed from the meaning. That's not what I meant in the context of my argument. But that shouldn't matter.
>The author wants to live in a world where everyone gets everything at no cost: that isn't even admiribale, it's childish.
The author seemed to deliberately avoid making value judgements of this sort until it compared to traditional reality media where there are more guardrails built in. Otherwise Just about the only editorializing there is the author’s speculation about Mr. Beat’s motives, that they are driven by a an extreme focus on creating desirably content for his audience.
The issue here isn't the money in a direct sense. People in the real world do worse jobs for less money, yes. But those jobs aren't intermediated by some benefactor who essentially treats human beings like lab rats.
Prostitution may be grueling but people generally do it to pay the bills in a trivial sense. Being put into some sort of alternate reality where you are being treated and experimented on like a video game character, to an audience who also probably perceives you as a virtual source of entertainment deserves to be looked at through a different lens than just bucks/hour made. It's a sort of low stakes hunger games where rich patrons throw people into an arena for their fun and benefit. The Mr Beast content could be its own Black Mirror episode.
And it's terrifying not despite but because the money isn't even that relevant. There's probably people who would do that stuff for free just to meet Mr Beast or get five minutes of online attention.
A lot of Mr. beasts content feel like reverse kidnapping and mental torture situations. And the only “mental trick” you need to pull to illustrate just how horrible a human being he is, is to imagine he’d given them the money up front and told them that to leave his enter-torture-ment they have to pay up a ransom matching the initial gift.
That’s what he’s subjecting poor people too, for fun and profit, because he knows the money is worth that much to them. And of cause because he’s making a fortune doing this.
I'm not that badly off and have never watched a Mr. Beast video prior to this. I would gladly stay within a 300ft circle for 100 days while some dude blasted clown noises at me in return for $500k. There's a library, a garden, some exercise bands, stationery, and 3000cal/day of food. I did 21 days isolation in an apartment at the start of the pandemic, which is 20% of the way there except with less floorspace.
There's a really good essay titled The Copenhagen Interpretations of Ethics[0], which makes an argument that the moment you interact with a problem you become responsible for it in the eyes of the world, even if you strictly improved it in a utilitarian sense, and even if the people judging you have done exactly nothing to fix the problem. Reminds me a bit of this.
Sure, people enter in willingly. And you’d be able to find quite a lot of Poot people who’d do really shitty stuff and let you be extremely shitty to them for money. But so what? He’s still kidnapping and terrorizing poor people and excusing it by paying them off. And Better yet he’s doing so for profit, but he’s effectively have them sign a contract that means they don’t get paid if he gets them to break. It screams of what a shitty person he is in setting this up. If it was just about giving money to poor people there would be no need for the sick games he plays with them, just do a feel good show about how much the money change their lives. But propably not as much add money in it for him doing that. He used to plant trees, now he brutalizes poor people. It’s sick even if it is with consent from the victims.
You can dislike his work, but FYI you cannot repurpose the word "kidnapping" like this. First, it's a lie. Second, it diminishes the traumatic experience of real kidnapping survivors.
Stop repurposing real words and making a joke of real experiences to satisfy for your own emotional position.
Don't bother quoting the definition here and bending around the truth to further your distortion.
"So what" is that pretty much everyone I know, poor or not, would do it. It's $500k for hanging out in a house reading and digging in the garden all day for 100 days and occasionally having kids mess with you. That's not necessarily easy, but it's a hell of a lot easier than the other things I'd have to do to earn $500k in four months.
I think you're getting offended on behalf of other people, when most of the world would think it was a sweet deal. This is just reality TV for people who were born after 2000, except the prize is better, the format is shorter, and it's less cut-throat. Nobody's kidnapped, there are no victims, and "sick games" is a bit of a stretch.
No he literally is not kidnapping anyone. Shawn could have walked out of the circle at any time. I don't understand why you think more choices is a bad thing. Let people labor however they want. If that means "humiliating" themselves for 100 days for millions on youtube so be it.
> If it was just about giving money to poor people there would be no need for the sick games he plays with them
No one would watch the video if he was just giving away money and therefore he wouldn't be giving away the money.
While I'm no fan of him, I think you might be too harsh.
> is to imagine he’d given them the money up front and told them that to leave his enter-torture-ment they have to pay up a ransom matching the initial gift.
People enter those challenges fully knowing how they're going to go. It's random, rules don't matter, you might get money you don't expect or not get money you expected. The point at which they get the money doesn't really matter, I don't find it a different situation.
> That’s what he’s subjecting poor people too, for fun and profit, because he knows the money is worth that much to them
Well, he gives amounts of money that are worth very much for a lot of people. I doubt there's a lot of people that can make $500k in 100 days, for example. I watched the one where there's 100 people in a circle, and people got quite a lot of money for the most random things (I think one gets several thousand dollars for being the first to go, for example). I'd get this criticism if the amounts of money were lower, but I don't think it's really the case. A lot of non-poor people would consider those challenges very much worth the money.
> And of cause because he’s making a fortune doing this.
He says that a lot of his videos lose money and I honestly believe it. Between the money he gives and the amounts he spends to make the videos (like renting entire stadiums) his costs must be incredibly high, even with as many subscribers as he has I imagine some videos might not break even. And he could very easily break even on all of them just by lowering the amounts of money and toning it down a little.
MrBeast is pushing the boundaries on the ethics and morals of how easily people with money can coerce poor people who are in dire need to perform extremely questionable things for the sake of his own amusement.
Personally I don’t think this is good in any meaningful way. You could only rationalise such behaviour with the same arguments that other forms of exploitation are explained.
The premise is mostly the same as a lot of game shows. You don't see rich people showing up to get on game shows. From glimpses I've seen of Japanese game shows, Mr Beast's takes a lot from them with the ridiculousness and over the top entertainment factor, the money involved is much more.
Another counterpoint is that they do good as well - 30+ million pounds of trash cleaned out the ocean with TeamSeas. Go see the one where they take over a bank in his hometown, no game show antics just handing out money in an entertaining way.
The problematic part is that Mr Beast offers little if any critical reflection about the systems that create wealth inequality, pollution, etc. and even less regarding his own role as a perceived philanthropist within that context.
It's not that it's inherently morally wrong to clean up the ocean, open a free bank or handing someone 500k for staying 100 days in a 100ft circle. It's the manifest obliviousness of not challenging the system and the premises that allow him to make his videos that's - industries generating single-use plastics, people not able to take out a mortgage,... - which is the issue.
His videos aren't in any way a social commentary. They are nothing more then entertainment, and they don't pretend to be anything else. That's what makes all of this morally questionable.
Exactly - we all don't have to be doing that all the time. And MrBeast does not choose random people or even poor people for these challenges, he chooses only his own subscribers - people who are already interested in this content and presumably watch it regularly and are delighted to be in one of the videos.
For the exact same reason why we teach little kids to throw their litter in the garbage bin instead of the ground, and hope that it will stick into adulthood: a range of values and ideas that display a due sense of caring and compassion.
How can it be unethical if the person knows full well what's coming with no surprises, and the person judged that it was in their best interest to do it? That'd be saying it's unethical to provide someone with a benefit-cost > 0 which they've agreed to, and I don't see why that should be true.
I'd agree it's unethical only if their cognition was compromised (meaning he wasn't capable of analyzing the costs and benefits and deciding if it was in his interest) or if there were surprises hidden (meaning he didn't really agree to what happened) or if it's a particular type of decision where people are known to not be capable of factoring in long-term costs properly into their decision making. But we don't know if any of this is true, do we?
An argument I would be sympathetic to would be that it's unethical not because of what happened to the subject in particular (after all, he net benefited if the above assumptions are met), but because of the negative flow-on impacts to culture and the social fabric.
> How can it be unethical if the person knows full well what's coming with no surprises, and the person judged that it was in their best interest to do it? That'd be saying it's unethical to provide someone with a benefit-cost > 0 which they've agreed to, and I don't see why that should be true.
It's unethical to ask people to perform an action which you know they would never agree to if it wasn't for an imbalance of power or financial pressure/incentives.
Otherwise you could say why did Harvey Weinstein get prosecuted. When he asked women to suck him off and they did it voluntarily then it's not wrong is it? I mean they could have just walked away and not get hired for his next film.
"It's unethical to ask people to perform an action which you know they would never agree to if it wasn't for an imbalance of power or financial pressure/incentives."
Under utilitarianism you need to compare it to the alternative. You can't say X is immoral if Y is the alternative and Y is worse than X. In many cases, X=terrible job, Y=nothing. Otherwise you're actively opposing someone's wellbeing. This is the fatal problem with these ad hoc ethical rules that aren't grounded in actual outcomes.
Consider the reductio ad absurdum. Almost everyone has a job because of financial pressures. Even upper middle class people feel pressure to secure themselves for old age and unforeseen circumstances. Is almost every job unethical? If yes, then you're saying that our species functioning is unethical, which is an absurdity. If no, then you don't believe it yourself.
"Harvey Weinstein"
No because he violated two of the assumptions I laid out, making it unethical under utilitarianism. He often introduced it as a surprise after the business relationship started. And he engaged in what was effectively high pressure sales tactics which jeopardizes the ability for the person to decide whether it's truly in their best interests (this would be a form of compromised cognition, similar to mentally ill homeless people in the Bumfights example).
A third thing: the attempts themselves were a sort of menacing assault which subtracted utility from the person, which they didn't agree to be subjected to upfront.
> How can it be unethical if the person knows full well what's coming with no surprises, and the person judged that it was in their best interest to do it? That'd be saying it's unethical to provide someone with a benefit-cost > 0 which they've agreed to, and I don't see why that should be true.
Because it's inherently degrading and dehumanizing. Ethics is more than just benefit vs cost.
It shouldn't be because then people can use their disgust response to moralize about other people's behavior, and that's historically done a lot of real-world harm. There needs to be an actual moral justification instead of ad hoc assertions. But I get that there's a lot of scope for different views under the banner of meta-ethics.
Is boxing ethical? People make choices because they believe it will make their life better. If the homeless people think the money is worth the fight that means the website is literally making their life better and therefore ethical.
I thought of bumfights when writing this, and decided that no, it's not ethical, because homeless people often suffer from mental illnesses which violates one of the assumptions that I laid out.
What if the person isn't mentally ill, but doesn't reliably have enough to eat to survive adequately, and can get it by fighting for the entertainment of others (who do have plenty to eat, and more to spare).
Is that ethical, because it's a rational cost-benefit analysis?
There are few people in the US who don't have enough to eat to fuel their bodies, but in other countries there are more. I am not trying to describe the particular people in "bumfights", who I don't know, but hypothetically working the boundaries of this analysis.
I also don't in fact think that people can be divided, in binary fashion, into those who are "rational" and "not rational".
It seems pretty clear to me that enticing desperate people to fight each other, for the entertainment of others who find their desperation emotionally engaging, and for the profit of the promoters -- is unkind and disrespectful and an attack on their dignity. Even if they are not "mentally ill." It seems hard to argue otherwise. Is it how you would treat a relative or friend? To hypothetically say, well, sure it's unkind and disrespectful and an assault on their dignity, and I wouldn't do it to someone I loved, but it's not unethical to do to make a buck or a laugh -- what is the point of "ethics", then, exactly?
> To hypothetically say, well, sure it's unkind and disrespectful and an assault on their dignity, but it's not unethical to do to make a buck or a laugh -- what is the point of "ethics", then, exactly?
But is it unkind? You're giving them a benefit (+$) and taking a cost (-dignity), and they've calculated that $ > dignity. Assuming their calculation was accurate, aren't you actually being kind? You are increasing their utility.
> I also don't in fact think that people can be divided, in binary fashion, into those who are "rational" and "not rational".
Yes, there isn't a clear dividing line between those who are capable of rationally calculating what's in their true best interest, and those who aren't. A dose of pragmatism is obviously needed. Homeless people are statistically much more likely to suffer from a mental illness which erodes their ability to rationally calculate costs and benefits more than others.
Definitely not, it would make me sad to subject them to that. I'd also feel pretty bad if I got them them to clean my house for money if they were in need. But that doesn't mean it's unethical, does it?
You wouldn't consider it either unkind or unethical to arrange for a needy family member to fight for money, you just wouldn't do it becuase it would make you sad? It doesn't seem an unkind thing to do, really?
But, yes, I think intentionally subjecting strangers to something that you wouldn't subject your loved ones to because it would make you sad, is at least a signal that something is likely to be unethical.
In general, I'd say profiting off of desperate people trading their dignity for money is probably unethical. Yes, I'm aware this can apply to other parts of society.
Is your opinion basically that there is no such thing as unethical employment of someone? That if someone is of sound mind, any employment conditions are always ethnical, there is basically no way for an employer to behave unethically with regard to their employees? No matter how degrading, how awful their experience is, it isn't actually possible to consider any such conditions unethical, because the desperate employee chose to engage in the employment?
> No matter how degrading, how awful their experience is
Correct, as long as my above assumptions are not violated. That is, no surprises post-contract signing, and so on[1].
Your actions are a net benefit to them. It can't be unethical to benefit someone, unless we're operating under a non-utilitarian moral framework.
I'd argue it's unethical to not provide them that terrible job, if the only alternative is for you to not engage with them whatsoever. You are leaving them worse off by choosing this so-called moral high ground. Society may pat you on the back for your upstanding choice, but you are leaving them worse off, so I believe it to be immoral to not provide them that job.
[1] In practice, this is fraught because of the power asymmetry -- the employer can easily introduce new conditions post-signing. But I'm assuming that the employer doesn't abuse that asymmetry. It's also fraught because people aren't rational creatures that are capable of perfectly evaluating costs and benefits. So we'd have to evaluate each situation on a case by case basis.
> You wouldn't consider it either unkind or unethical to arrange for a needy family member to fight for money
I would consider it less unethical to do that, compared to withholding the money. There's a rank order here. It's more ethical to pay them to fight (under my above assumptions) than it is to withhold the money, because you are maximizing their utility by doing so, i.e. you're helping them the most by doing that, relative to that alternative.
Of course it would be maximally good to just give them the money with no strings attached. But that doesn't imply that it's unethical to pay them to fight.
> make you sad, is at least a signal
I am highly skeptical of such evolved responses that are there because of kin selection, reciprocal altruisim, etc. If I feel bad, it means that I'm doing something that's correlated with a reduction in genetic fitness, that's it. Moral certainty based on feelings has motivated genocides, anti-sodomy laws and many other terrible things.
> I'd argue it's unethical to not provide them that terrible job,
Then why would it make you sad to provide a family member or loved one with that terrible job, say fighting homeless people for the entertainment of those who find their pathos entertaining? Why wouldn't you feel great, providing them with that job that is a net benefit to them? I mean, maybe not as good as if you were able to just give them a gift, but there's no reason to feel sad, right, you've given them a net gain, setting them up to fight homeless people on youtube?
I think if everyone acted according to your principles, there would be a net gain in human misery. Speaking of utilitarian frameworks. Human dignity benefits from, well, valuing human dignity and feeling a responsibility for it.
But ok, this conversation is going as far as it's going to.
If I had realized you thought it was literally impossible for any employer to behave unethically toward an employee, I wouldn't have gone this far with it. Now I'm curious if you are the same Ayn Randian I had a similar conversation with a few weeks ago, looking through my history... nope, that was someone else! It is very convenient for those who profit from taking advantage of desperate people to believe it is literally impossible for this to be unethical; less convenient for the desperate people being taken advantage of.
"Then why would it make you sad to provide a family member or loved one with that terrible job"
It would also make me feel extremely sad to not give them money with no strings attached if they're in need. What's the point? Are you saying that it's unethical to not give your money to family?
If they needed the money, I would feel better getting them to fight for it (because after all, that's better than them dying of cancer or whatever the money is for!) than I would not giving them the money, but I'd feel bad in both situations, because all I'd want to do is maximally help them, and either of these options isn't that.
"I think if everyone acted according to your principles, there would be a net gain in human misery."
That's funny because I thought the same about your views. There are people on the left that want to shut down trade with China or Bangladesh because they view low wages as exploitative. They would condemn these people to the outcome of poverty and death because of their ad hoc ethical rules that have no grounding in outcomes.
"If I had realized you thought it was literally impossible for any employer to behave unethically toward an employee"
I said the opposite. Look at my list of assumptions. In those assumptions are all the typical violations of the employee to employer power dynamic, such as unexpected surprises after the contract is signed (say, unexpected occupational hazard, whatever), deceptive fine print in the contract, pressure tactics to get them to agree to something they don't want to, and so on. That's hardly a Randian perspective. Rand thinks none of these things are possible because people are rational creatures that will never agree to something that isn't in their best interest.
It'd be unethical not to offer them the fight. That would mean they would continue to starve. If I had the choice between fighting and starving I'd probably choose fight, and if a do gooder came into the ring as it was about to begin and said "no no no, this is unethical" I'd be pissed because their actions are condemning me to starve.
I'm not arguing that it's good, only that it's not as exploitative as the parent made it to be.
Also, until now, the most questionable thing would be the 100 days in a circle one, and the reward is $500k. I think most people, even if not in dire need, would happily go and do that. Here in the comments you already see examples of that.
And, most importantly, I don't see the "coercion" anywhere. Most of the people participating are subscribers to him, he's not just searching for poor people out of the street.
Following that line of argument, every interaction with money involved is coercive. There must be something else that defines whether there is coercion or not.
I think the comparison with Squid Game is apt. Of course he's not killing anyone, it's all voluntary, legal, and far more benign than what the Frontman in Squid Game does, but in essence it's still using extreme monetary reward to tempt people to subject themselves to treatment they wouldn't otherwise consider.
Then again, if you keep scaling down like that, in what way is regular work any better?
> People enter those challenges fully knowing how they're going to go.
People who have financial need aren’t able to clearly decline and have agency over their decision. Asking someone who supports a family if they will degrade themselves for $500k if not really a fair question and people will say yes.
It’s like saying that people who blow their boss do it knowing fully well what they’re getting into. There is a power imbalance so even perceived consent isn’t really consent because of the leverage and greater power of one party.
> People who have financial need aren’t able to clearly decline and have agency over their decision. Asking someone who supports a family if they will degrade themselves for $500k if not really a fair question and people will say yes.
Except that this isn't targeting people who have financial need. At the prices we're talking about, quite a lot of people will find it a good deal. And "degrading" might be a strong word, maybe the being alone in a circle for 100 days is pushing it, but from what I've seen (which is not too much) it's mostly games and small challenges.
> It’s like saying that people who blow their boss do it knowing fully well what they’re getting into. There is a power imbalance so even perceived consent isn’t really consent because of the leverage and greater power of one party.
Well, applying that strict line of thought, you can argue that people can't really consent to having a job, or playing the lottery, or betting on a game because there is a power imbalance and greater power of one party.
For a more practical approach, the useful thing is to look at how many people can realistically reject the offer if they don't want to do it. In the case of "blowing your boss", rejecting the offer means losing a job you might need to survive. In the videos case, rejecting means just not getting the money, it'd be similar as offering lottery tickets specially given how the participants seem to be random subscribers.
> Except that this isn't targeting people who have financial need.
I don’t think it’s fair to say that. The person who “won” the chance has two young kids and a spouse. I’m fairly sure he really needs $500k. If he’s like a typical person he has student loans, bills and lots of debt.
It would be kind of perverse to have someone compete who didn’t really need the money.
If you ask a random human to degrade themself for $500k there’s a power imbalance as most people don’t lead a zen existence where that’s not a life changing amount of money.
But that person was randomly selected among subscribers. And it’s not “need” in the sense that it doesn’t look like he’d suffer serious consequences from rejecting the challenge. It’s not like “if I reject this job I’ll be homeless”.
The issue with your line of thought is that it leads to concluding that most jobs are unethical.
People will say yes because it's a good deal. Obtaining 500k is incredibly difficult and requires a full decade of work for most people. How is creating a business that enables people to get a decades worth of work done in 100 days unethical? No one is forced into these videos. Everyone can leave just as well off as they started. If the videos didn't exist the people who got the money would be much worse off. In fact, I'll go ahead and say shutting down his channel would be unethical because it removes the choice he is giving people.
> He says that a lot of his videos lose money and I honestly believe it.
Lot of big Youtubers say that the videos themselves dont make lot of money but the more views a video has the more merch they sell, that brings in the profits.
Mr. Beast himself used to subject himself to torture for profit, so it's not surprising that other people are happy to do the same. His first viral video was counting to 100,000. There was another video where he tried to spend 24 hours underwater and stopped because he had built to much CO2.
While true I love how the norm of discussion about this is bouncing between two things as if they are mutually exclusive.
Yes Mr. Beast is just following incentives that youtube + attention economy + other factors created for him.
But also: he chose to do that. I've personally walked away from good gigs when I was eating rice and beans because they didn't align with my values. He doesn't seem to realise or care. And maybe that's because of his situation, which should the also be addressed. But there still remains some personal responsibility for choosing to make money (lots of money) this way
Mr. Beast is giving away millions of dollars. Imo his channel is unequivocally making the world a better place by providing entertainment and giving people the choice to forego a decade of work for 100 days of humiliation.
Nonsense. Mr. Beast isn't an unthinking tool, but an intelligent human being. Exploiting people for money is unethical no matter how much 'the audience' wants to see it.
I mean, so is something like Who Wants To Be a Millionare[0] exploitative as well?
The whole idea is that people voluntarily sign up, to be "tortured" with difficult questions, for a chance to win some money. Of course the TV producers make money on the show, by broadcasting the whole thing for the audience's amusement. I'm just curious where you think the line lies between this and what Mr Beast is doing?
That's an interesting thought. I'll try to brainstorm a bit, since my meeting is a bit boring :)
First, what was also mentioned in the linked blog post, Mr Beast's videos lack a certain level of fairness, winners of his competitions are often decided by luck, not merit.
Second, maybe there's an added benefit for both competitors and audience when watching Who Wants To Be a Millionare. I'm not sure if that's measurable metric, but it's definitely present. I can learn something new, or test my own knowledge, maybe even decide to sign up.
The air quotes around tortured are doing 100% of the work here. There may indeed be some nervousness associated with taking part in any sort of competition, but I think most people would stipulate that white collar adult professionals answering 15 multiple-choice questions in 30 minutes in a comfortable studio wearing clothes of their choice, preparing in a green room, given access to water and bathrooms is pretty low on the torture scale. Likewise, we don't typically consider, say, taking part in a poker tournament to be torture, or taking part in a 10K race or submitting something to an art contest.
There are, in fact, quiz shows that add torture elements. Rob Lowe hosts Mental Samurai, which is a quiz show where participants are put through physical disorientation[0]. This might be a closer parallel to what you are highlighting, but even still there are coherent and easily articulated ways in which this is not torture.
There are a great many reality programs that do actually involve a sort of physical depravation which is closer to torture. Big Brother and Survivor both involve not just physical challenges, but also punishments that are centered around depriving people of the sorts of creature comforts they are accustomed to in normal life. Even then you don't have torture, because again the vast majority of the experience involves being treated with comfort and dignity, the punishments that are small in scale and support systems in place to ensure they do not present real threat. So, for instance, you might have someone being awoken in the middle of the night as a part of a challenge, but they will be informed of that in advance, given additional time to sleep later, and the disruption will be minimal.
Mr. Beast's stuff has more in common with challenges like the Hands on a Hardbody challenge[1], where poor people go to a car dealership and have to touch a truck for an extended period of time to win the truck.[1] The contestant pool are mostly people who are quite poor, some of whom seem to be mentally ill, the willingness to do it for the prize almost surely implies they have inadequate access to transportation, and it's extremely undignified. But even this has hourly breaks.
It seems like a bit of feigned ignorance to respond to someone criticizing the Mr. Beast stuff by suggesting it is difficult or impossible to draw a coherent line in the sand, and then offering such a patently absurd example as something you think would have to be definitionally included. It comes off as playing language games rather than seriously engaging the substance of the criticism.
But we are not paying for it. He just gets the views and Google (YouTube) are those who think it is ok to pay for this content. People will always consume content about some
crazy shit if it is made for free, but would we actually have to pay for it then it would show that most kids who watch MrBeast content today couldn’t actually care less about it.
Let’s look at it from another angle to bring my point home. If a person gets assaulted and the assault gets recorded by CCTV cameras and then shown on BBC news then lots of people click the article and view the video, but nobody (or mostly nobody) would pay the BBC to assault another person and film it and then stream it. Do you see the difference?
No, but we're not talking about that. We're talking only about if these particular videos cross some kind of imaginary line which is different for everyone and constantly shifts in our minds based on the last comment we read on HN.
This feels very doom and gloom. Mr Beast gets to make the videos he wants, viewers get to watch amazing videos and people who are featured in the videos generally get paid. Everyone wins.
Most of his videos are basically excuses to give people money and you rarely see participants not having a good time. Having the guy sit around for 100d is the most 'exploitative' video I've seen, but that really doesn't seem like the goal.
If he starts making real-life Hunger Games videos I'd be worried, but it doesn't feel like he's heading in that direction at all. More like a new version of game shows, except it's way less forced, more varied and very lighthearted.
To be fair this video also felt a lot like an excuse to give someone half a million dollars. He brought his kids around on Father's day so it wouldn't be too difficult. The circle was big enough and equipped enough to be able to exercise, maintain good hygiene, do some gardening...
The 'toughest' bit was having a marching band play all night, ONE night.
I'm a fan of the survival show 'Alone' and there people have to survive out of pretty much nothing for 50-100 days in the hope of earning the same amount of money. This guy had everything provided, the only challenge was boredom and missing people !
Should we ignore that all of this is funded by the advertising industrial complex, advertisements which are arguably extremely harmful to society due to the cheap-shallow manipulation that occurs with them?
Should we ignore the fact that so many people watch his videos that it's impossible to ignore the number? I agree that his videos are basically a polished version of "give a homeless guy money to do something cruel". People watch them to see what people do for money. There s nothing beautiful in that, but it's a curiosity and it grabs attention. If it wasnt through ads, someone else would be funding it, i dont think that being ad-supported changes the dynamic of his audience.
> In interviews, he explains that many of his videos lose money, and he invests almost all of his earnings from You back into more videos
I dont think this is true. He either doesn’t understand his revenue and costs or is misleading and spinning BS to seem more relatable.
He’s the 5th most subscribed YouTube channel. He’s making gobs of money off all his videos. That’s why he’s quite wealthy now.
He seems totally full of horse apples and is the closest we’ve gotten to “Ass: the Movie” in my lifetime.
I don’t want to be an old person yelling at clouds so if people like watching him then I leave it alone. I suppose there are worse things to watch. But it all seems too contrived for me to enjoy it.
In this case it was a simple, boring task and 100/100 anyone dropped into that circle would stay for 100 days to get $500k.
It depends on how he is measuring it. If it is just in terms of what he gets from youtube and not advertising then it is easier to imagine.
Then there is also the fact that it is probably the case that for every one of these big budget videos that don't make money he has several smaller ones that do make money. The big ones bring in the audience and the small ones bring in the money.
> If it is just in terms of what he gets from youtube and not advertising then it is easier to imagine.
Well this is an odd way to measure profitable. What’s the benefit to this method?
Imagine if Google said “we lose money on every search run. Unless you count the advertising, then we make billions. But we lose money on most of our activities.”
This just seems naively stupid. Because “most videos” is a dumb metric. Imagine if your VC answered the question “Are you rich from your fund?” with “Well we lost money on most of our investments.”
This is either a dodge or just a lucky fool. Mr Beast doesn’t seem like an imbecile so I assume he’s just trying to be humble or deflective.
Just from doing the YouTube napkin math if you saw his balance sheet he would have hundreds of millions.
Because trust me, the world would know if he donated to charity.
He’s obviously saying that the views he gets from some video doesn’t always pull in the money it took to create that video which is mostly a point of how much he invests into zany sets, huge giveaways, and such.
But based on the view count and the published YouTube payout rate it’s clear that he’s making bucketloads of money. It’s not pertinent if some of his videos don’t immediately break even.
He’s making lots of money from YouTube views alone. Not to mention other markets, sponsorships, etc.
Yeah, but it’s strange to spinning it like “I don’t even make a profit on many of these but I still do it!”
That’s nothing special at all, he simply rediscovered the concept of “loss leader”. He not doing those videos despite their lack of profit, he’s doing the because they’re the reason he has profitable content to begin with. It would be like a shaving company saying “I know it seems crazy, but we lose so much money on these shaving handles, but we do it anyway!” Everyone knows what’s really going on there, what the business model really is.
That's the business model. If somebody like him is doing things for YouTube and they are not willing to burn the money they earn to do more spectacular things, and he is, he beats them.
If he beats them, he gets more money, which he blows in order to beat them again, and so on. The winner isn't him, it's YouTube hosting him. He's lowbrow 'Ow My Balls' guy, but in reality.
It's always been like that. If somebody has a platform and they are able to benefit from somebody beating themselves into the ground for attention, they're going to subsidize that behavior, design their system to reward the guy who's willing to win at any cost. He then gets to be the attention winner and be constantly striving to be attention-getting, by any means necessary, and the PLATFORM wins and earns the actual profit.
The guy's being rewarded for exactly that behavior.
He spends hundreds of thousands to millions on producing videos, it's very likely he doesn't make a profit on a lot of them. It also seems like he's expanding at a pretty incredible rate.
>In this case it was a simple, boring task and 100/100 anyone dropped into that circle would stay for 100 days to get $500k
Crazy how the video of this simple, boring task has 32M views. Mr Beast manages to make this kind of stuff very engaging.
The Kardasians tv show gets bizarre (to me) views as well. People find it engaging.
That’s ok, people can like their thing. But that doesn’t make it bullshit. Lots of people read The Secret and like it. It doesn’t stop the book from being absolute poppycock.
> In this case it was a simple, boring task and 100/100 anyone dropped into that circle would stay for 100 days to get $500k.
Not sure that anyone could do it. He made the job easier by forking with the guy and providing human contact. Should have left the guy alone. 100 days of solitary confinement can literally drive you nuts.
I've never seen a mr. beast video because I found the weird sex-doll gaping face on all his videos extremely off-putting and so I block every channel that displays one whenever they're suggested. In fact, the reason I learned it was possible to block channels at all was specifically due to these videos constantly being suggested.
I only know what the name is because a picture of him showed up in some other video-- and because I'm constantly reminded by how often I need to block new stuff because more of it keeps showing, even though I always block it.
I'm kinda surprised to read this article and hear how awful the content is-- esp given that many other YT channels have spoken highly of him. The face just seemed to non-genuine and engineered to overstimulate some neural network (artificial or organic) and left me feeling that watching even one would be contributing to the downfall of civilization. It's interesting to see that my initial highly negative impression may have had some basis: it certainly doesn't sound like content I would find worthwhile.
That sex-doll gaping face or the fake shocked "Omg I cannot believe everything I'm seeing" face is de rigeur for YT, and I'm guessing it's because The Algorithm (blessed be its bytes) has determined kids click on thumbnails with incredibly exaggerated facial expressions.
People need to study more why that gaping face became a trick to the algorithm. It's certainly (I hope) not functioning adults that are so easily tricked by it? I suspect a large amount of what drives the algorithm is young impressionable kids and that basically dictates the trend for the rest of us.
That sounds like a great extension, but at the same time I just block those channels that engage in that. None of them make any content worth consuming.
How do you know if a channel has content worth consuming if you block it without watching it?
Literally hundreds of good channels worth consuming have thumbnails like that. I find it off-putting too, but videos are severely punished for not having them.
If its that good I'll hear about it from someone else... though I can't say that I've seen too much on youtube that my life would be that much worse off if I'd simply gone without it.
> I've never seen a mr. beast video because I found the weird sex-doll gaping face on all his videos extremely off-putting […]
Glad to hear I'm not the only one put off by whatever that look is (interestingly worded too). For me it's something in the eyelids giving him a sort of watery look that triggers a deep-seated automatic feeling of disgust (and then there is the topic of the content itself which makes it a rational disgust).
Huh? On the front page I can for each recommended video select "Not interested" or "Don't recommend channel". This is on Firefox both desktop and Android.
On creator focused networks like YouTube, tiktok or instagram your recommendations get reset if you accidentally open a link to a video or channel you marked as “Don’t recommend this X.”.
If you really want to nuke them from your feed the easiest way is to report them. Might be ethical questionable but the 99,9X% of reports get ignored anyway so why not use it as feature.
> I found the weird sex-doll gaping face on all his videos extremely off-putting
The contestants have to play by Mr Beast's rules, Mr Beast has to play by Youtube's algorithm rules. The algorithm recommends videos with clickbait thumbnails and titles.
> > I found the weird sex-doll gaping face on all his videos extremely off-putting
> The contestants have to play by Mr Beast's rules, Mr Beast has to play by Youtube's algorithm rules. The algorithm recommends videos with clickbait thumbnails and titles.
And, if we choose, youtube has to play by our rules. I'm trying to do my part, you can join me.
I watch most of Mr Beasts videos (primarily because "the algorithm" throws them at my face until I give in), but his recent interview with Graham Stephen[1] shows another side of him.
He lives in his office, doesn't care about personal wealth and is absolutely dedicated to making YouTube videos. He's definitely an odd fellow.
“Do not recommend channel” is an option hidden in a three dot menu on the video thumbnail. Without it youtube is unusable. You do not have to consume the shit it forces into your eyeholes.
Interesting that your comment got some emotional responses. Do people identify with MrBeast as a person? I mean he s good at what he does but he s a cruel executionist, not relatable at all after he leaves the office. He 's entertaining, or else he would be as sleazy as the other person in that video.
I’m not sure that aspect of his personality makes it any better. Think of any horrible corporate behavior that causes human suffering and imagine a CEO who genuinely, honestly says “I’m just obsessively driven to make may customers happy. I donate every last penny to charity”
That doesn’t really make the human suffering aspect any better.
(Side note: I want to be clear that I don’t think what Mr. Beast does can compare to the worst things that some corporations do, not at all. It’s just an apt comparison to explore the extent to which motives matter or not in things like this)
You obviously have no idea what are you talking about. He not only donates to charity, he actually set up a charity by himself called Beast Philanthropy where he supplies people in need with food, schools with supplies, etc.
He also spearheaded two huge ecological campaigns - Team Trees (to plant millions of trees around the globe) and Team Seas (to clean up tonnes of garbage from the sea).
Oh, belive me, he does donate to charity quite a bit. Check out his charity channel and videos. He has a charity manager that distributes food and do food drives in a couple of states.
I think one thing most posts saying "he optimizes for the algorithm" ignore is that content also slowly influences our desired and our culture. It's all a gigantic and relatively slow-moving feedback loop, where content influences culture and desires, which again influences content.
MrBeast's videos I find particularly damaging to culture, since it's incredibly dehumanizing and stripped of any nuance of the labor/value/money dynamic.
It's sad that I've become less and less confident that people can be trusted with what they consume -- food, content, anything.
I mean, the more complex the world become, the worse our choices are in free market, since we don't see the long term consequences of some decisions. For instance, getting a streaming-service subscription is convenient for the consumer, but in practice it seems like making a customer binary (either on board or out) has made content more a race-to-the-bottom.
In the end, I think that gatekeeping of some kind can increase both quality and the tastes of the average consumer. The fact that it's hard has led us to abandon it completely though, similarly to how people say now "the government can't make anything".
I also know that I'm a weak creature, and could use some external help to not deliver me constant temptations. If you see content as food for your mind, I find it easy to binge junk, only to be left with a feeling of emptiness after a while.
> How does Mr. Beast have the money to create these videos? He’s the fifth most subscribed to YouTube channel in the world.
I had never heard of him or watched any of his videos. And now I have, and I'm afraid YT will recommend more. Not that I would ever watch one again except by accident, but still. I feel dirty.
Also, about this:
> t’s terrifying that a man spent one hundred days in a small circle in an empty field. It’s even more terrifying that this is solely at the whims of a single former Minecraft YouTube creator (...) But there’s no standards, no compliance department telling Mr. Beast that this video maybe isn’t the best idea
Apparently the author has never heard of Tomoaki Hamatsu (Nasubi), a Japanese guy who was tricked into surviving off sweepstakes, fully naked, not for 100 days but for 15 months, while filmed and broadcasted 24/7 (without him even knowing it).
This stunt was organized by Nippon TV in 2000. It fascinated the whole country of Japan for as long as it ran, and some time after that.
At this point he's quite likely the majority shareholder of a fast food empire, a chocolate bar company, and the owner of the Youtube channel. On top of that there is a layer of distribution deals and sub-channels (I mean there's even a Mr. Beast in Español channel).
I suspect that early on much of it was carried on the back of personal and business debt, but once the fast food division took off it all made more sense.
I also don't like where this is heading culturally, and while I find him odd, his crew or whatever the other members are seem incredibly annoying and vapid. It's also through watching Mr Beast videos, that every Westerner should immediately be able to understand why so much of the world has varying degrees of hate towards the West.
I think it's extremely plausible that he dumps all his earnings back into furthering his empire. It's the Amazon model, but for a personality (Bezos profits off Amazon beating all its competitors at executing on being an online store, MrBeast profits off beating all his competitors at being a youtuber)
It's basically an endgame for capitalism. When you lower the friction of engagement and globalize everything so it becomes possible to try and be the winner of 'the market' as in the WORLD, there will be people in control who insist on being THE winner even if it costs them.
It makes perfect sense that MrBeast dumps all his money back into YouTube attention, and it makes perfect sense that he conducts money give-aways to immunize himself against criticism, and everything that he makes (and re-gives) also makes YouTube money, so they are deeply invested in aligning with him and his approach.
He is not ABOUT bringing a return on his investments (or indeed, fairly paying or treating his own employees). He is about beating the market, about winning, and anything else is disposable externalities. He paid off his mom's house when it became trivial for him to do so.
When he dies, it all collapses. He's not building anything except that he's cementing YouTube dominance.
This is so odd to me because this isn't my experience with Youtube at all. I just opened the homepage and it's mostly content I subscribe to and music that I've listened to before (I use Youtube for listening to DJ sets/Live music a lot.) I scrolled for a while and didn't see any Mr. Beast videos recommended.
Maybe it's because I pay for Premium? I also don't use Youtube that much.
To clarify: I don't see anything from blocked channels, but there are a thousand clones of blocked channels and YouTube ignores my obvious signal that I don't want anything to do with them.
I block a Minecraft channel and YouTube shows me another and another and another.
I block a K-pop channel and YouTube shows me more and more K-Pop.
Yeah, my recommendations are only content I subscribe to and videos related to that.
The “related videos” sidebar next to the video doesn’t seem more willing to experiment with different content, but not so much my homepage recommendations unless I’m endless scrolling.
Vigilence. Don't show me this video. Tell me why? Don't like the video. Not interested. Also, subscribe and like videos you do enjoy, not only for the content, but the style of delivery. Takes roughly 2 months to start not being a cesspit.
Also: have an account, and remove garbage from your history if you watched it - and watch out, those auto playing shorts are going into your history. Hide the shelf, in app, or with uBlock origin.
- Click 'not interested' whenever you see such a suggestion.
- Never click the suggestion!
- Like and subscribe to content that you want to see instead.
I go out of my way to select the 3-dot menu and select not only "not interested", but then go to the second step of saying "because I don't like this content". It makes zero difference.
User is "not interested" in this Football video because he "doesn't like this content"? User did the same for 15 Football videos?
Perhaps user just has been exposed to enough Football videos yet.
not having a youtube account seems to help. i watch different types of videos in different firefox containers and my kids watch on a different laptop. they see mr beast all the time, but i never notice him showing up for me.
YT being useless as usual because you can only tell it you don't like a video only in specific sections, but still happily shows hidden channels elsewhere, like search, with no option to tweak it. And search is useless anyway, biased towards trending and just vaguely being related to your search keywords.
"It’s terrifying that a man spent one hundred days in a small circle in an empty field. It’s even more terrifying that this is solely at the whims of a single former Minecraft YouTube creator who happened to find the perfect niche to build a platform and happens to have a perfect sense for what his millions of anonymous viewers want from a video."
Cannot agree less on this take. There's dozen of interviews with Jimmy (Mr. Beast himself) where he explains his POV, why he does what he does, and what his goal is: make the best YT videos possible.
Nobody is forced to partecipate in his videos.
Maybe this difference in opinion in based on age? Or some other metric?
Some people fundamentally have an issue with the idea of making money off of what essentially amounts to embarrassment or (depending on the challenge) light mental torture.
Mr. Beast's motives are irrelevant if that's the belief you're operating under.
Those views seem inconsistent unless those people also disagree with compensated labor.
There’s already a type of degradation in a conventional job: someone having power over you that you can’t question, you have to degrade yourself by being agreeable to nonsense, you have to whore out your time and attention and energy, etc.
Spending 100 days in isolation is less degrading to me than all the things people take for granted at even their cushy software job, they’re just used to it.
How many of you are forced to sit in on absolutely banal Zoom meetings yet grandstanding about what someone else wants to do for $500k?
There's a spectrum of embarrassment/torture between "100 days in a circle" and "sitting in boring Zoom meetings," wouldn't you agree?
A person that has no problem with paid labor but does have an issue with 100 days in a circle could have a consistent view if they believe that the former doesn't rise to the level of "torture" or "embarrassment."
Looking at the comments of the people who hate MrBeast, I suspect a large amount of them do disagree with compensated labour. It's like MrBeast has become an avatar for capitalism in people's minds.
In that case singling out Mr. Beast makes no sense, there's reality TV shows which are much more extreme in embarrassment and torture than any Mr. Beast video.
Part of the article is about the intersection of embarrassment for money and algorithmic content recommendations. Mr. Beast is an example that embodies both of these trends, whereas reality TV is necessarily less "online" than a social media influencer. In a lot of ways, online content is an intensification of the trend that reality shows like "Fear Factor" started.
It's also a short article. Bringing in other examples would necessarily lengthen the piece and potentially distract from the major points of the piece.
I'm surprised at how many people view this as legitimately torturous. I'd happily do the same for twice as long and for half the money. Hell, Henry David Thoreau did this in the woods, on purpose, for two years, with only a brief refrain when he was arrested for not paying his taxes.
A lot of the Internet popular culture really is just an echo of something someone else did years before, but with less fanfare, no money involved, and without the desire to get as much attention as possible. One of my favorite performance artists is Tehching Hsieh, who did 4 time-based works:
- One Year Performance 1978–1979 (Cage Piece)
"In this performance, which lasted from 29 September 1978 through 30 September 1979, the artist locked himself in an 11.5-by-9-by-8-foot (3.5 by 2.7 by 2.4 m) wooden cage, furnished only with a wash basin, lights, a pail, and a single bed. During the year, he did not allow himself to talk, to read, to write, or to listen to radio and TV. A lawyer, Robert Projansky, notarized the entire process and made sure the artist never left the cage during that one year. His loftmate came daily to deliver food, remove the artist's waste,[3] and take a single photograph to document the project. In addition, this performance was open to be viewed once or twice a month from 11 am to 5 pm.
- One Year Performance 1980–1981 (Time Clock Piece)
For one year, from 11 April 1980 through 11 April 1981, Hsieh punched a time clock every hour on the hour. Each time he punched the clock, he took a single picture of himself, which together yield a 6-minute movie. He shaved his head before the piece, so his growing hair reflects the passage of time.
- One Year Performance 1981–1982 (Outdoor Piece)
In his third one-year performance piece, from 26 September 1981 through 26 September 1982, Hsieh spent one year outside, not entering buildings or shelter of any sort, including cars, trains, airplanes, boats, or tents. He moved around New York City with a packbag and a sleeping bag.
- Art / Life: One Year Performance 1983-1984 (Rope Piece)
In this performance, Hsieh and Linda Montano spent one year between 4 July 1983 and 4 July 1984 tied to each other with an 8-foot-long (2.4 m) rope. They had to stay in the same room when inside, but were not allowed to touch each other until the end of the one-year period. Both shaved their hair in the beginning of the year, and the performance was notarized initially by Paul Grassfield and later by Pauline Oliveros.
Reminds me of the story of Nasubi: “Tomoaki Hamatsu was challenged to stay alone, unclothed, in an apartment for Susunu! Denpa Shōnen (January 1998 – March 2002), a Japanese reality-television show on Nippon Television, after winning a lottery for a "show business related job". He was challenged to enter mail-in sweepstakes until he won ¥1 million (about US$10,000) in total. He started with nothing (including no clothes), was cut off from outside communication and broadcasting, and had nothing to keep him company except the magazines he combed through for sweepstakes entry forms. After spending 335 days to reach his target, he set the Guinness world record for the "longest time survived on competition winnings".”
There's a lot of severe, judgemental commenting going on here, stooping to actually name-calling Mr. Beast.
Guys, relax. He's an entertainment entrepreneur. He's a circus ringleader. He gives normal people a chance to be trapeze artists for a day. Is it easy? No. It's hard work. But it's a once in a lifetime experience that people sign up for, mostly for that experience, with the money being secondary.
Nobody gets hurt, and he pays his people extremely, extremely generously.
His business model isn't cruelty and torture. It's just a circus that gives away huge sums of money.
The author (coldhealing) sure can write. I've seen maybe 3 Mr. Beast vids in passing, but now I want to really watch a few more. His bit on Joe Rogan about translating content was pretty clever too.
OT, but was Joe Rogan during that time (playing) an idiot that never second guesses blatant lies? I find it hard to watch obscure experts, that are either genius' or delusional, and not know what I heared/watched due to no classification by a reliable source, as any journalist should provide with any third party statement.
Therefore, I'd rather watch an interview elsewhere.
I think he now has a "fact checker" who googles questions (nope, not scholar.google.com, regular google queries), but interviews seem to stick to their obscure logic even if a house of cards was just debunked at the very foundation by five minutes of fact checking.
I'm not really interested in Mr. Beast's content but there is a video from one of the engineers involved in his Squid Game recreation that I thought was pretty interesting. Seems like this guy went for three whole weeks without sleeping, just piling on hack after hack to make the event come together.
> During the pandemic, he partnered with local restaurants to sell “Beast Burgers”, a proprietary burger recipe that any kitchen could make and sell with his branding, and in interviews he speaks proudly of restaurants that would have gone out of business without the interest Beast Burgers provided.
No. He inked a deal with a kitchen arbitrage venture.
Seems to me that people are much more upset about this particular video (guy in circle for 100 days) because he's a husband and father. If it had been a young 20-something person, nobody would bat an eye.
Is this the algorithm or just late-stage capitalism / pre-post scarcity economics?
I think situations like these will only become increasingly prevalent as time passes thanks to technological development decreasing the raw resource cost of goods and services. Because while we have a good mechanism for reliably increasing productivity and efficiency, no analogous mechanism exists for distribution. Thus profit / wealth inevitably concentrates and you end up with
> the lengths to which humans in the twenty-first century will go to slurp up the drips of unimaginable wealth that the algorithm leaks out through Mr. Beast.
I have no idea how you actually come up with a reasonable solution for this since communism/socialism clearly failed. My hope is that there's enough trickle down from technological growth, that despite increasing wealth inequality, at least the baseline minimum will be high enough that even the poorest people will be able to have a decent standard of living.
> I have no idea how you actually come up with a reasonable solution for this since communism/socialism clearly failed.
You could simply give people more than just some drips that keep them on the edge of desperation. Whether or not you consider that socialism, it has been quite successful in a lot of countries. The failure of a totalitarian dictatorship in no way implies that excessive wealth inequality is the only alternative.
However much money your imagined society gives out people will still gladly do game shows for extra cash. Unless you want to be honest and say no one should have even a single extra penny to spend how they please
The question isn't whether someone will die but what happens after.
80s shlock like Running Man used to be portrayals of a ridiculous dystopia, but at this point they should be considered a warning. We already increasingly undervalue human life and have culturally accepted avoidable deaths as long as they can be justified with "personal responsibility" or follow from a perceived moral failing.
We're not there yet, but we're inching ever closer.
The first article of the post-WW2 constitution of Germany does not establish freedom of speech but the sanctity of human dignity. Of course in practice only lip service is paid to this, but it feels like "entertaintment" like Mr Beast's videos are the exact antithesis.
I wouldn’t seek out a personal trainer who chooses the name Mr. Hyde personally.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes - the $500k isn’t stupid, but the psychological effects are forever. Hope some of that money got earmarked for therapy and counseling! Not kidding, I am an advocate for CBT and I’m pretty sure this situation is pretty similar to stories where lottery winners end up with mo money mo problems.
LMAO, this stunt is a lot less psychologically damaging than my first job I worked as a teenager for $6.15/hr. At that job people lobbed personal insults at my daily, I was treated like human garbage, I was touched inappropriately many times, and I was always getting a raise "next week."
Psychological effects? The contestant volunteered for this, and was able to step out at any time (many times while still making a good amount of money).
How many people were kept locked in their - possibly smaller - homes during COVID with no option to exit and no end date in sight?
those videos are crafted to be impressionable and consumable, almost too fast to watch, no time spent to know the protagonists etc. But it also feels terminal, like, there is nothing else after he will have rehashed every major TV trope in 10 minutes. He will certainly bank big and retire soon , this is not a long-term sustainable operation. I don't think he s pointing to any particular direction in entertainment. He's making a soft versions of a squid game, but after that, what?
It strikes me that he doesnt have competition in youtube currently, because nobody else (?) makes videos with somewhat substantial budgeting that feel like TV. So his videos get all the attention among the various podcast/travel/other kinds of slow-paced, monothematic videos. BUT he might start a trend here of big budget youtube productions. This will depend on his margins, but I m not sure that the relatively small payout of youtube will allow such trend
> That’s the world we’re headed into. In the future, content is ruled by algorithmic desire, and those best suited to steer on the seas of the algorithm’s waves and whims.
What’s often misunderstood and unaccounted for is that this algorithm is a feed back loop. We are adapting to it as much as it’s adapting to us.
I won't complain about this new world of "algorithmic desire" because my desires provide me with interesting and enjoyable content (none of Mr. Beast).
Perhaps the problem isn't the algorithms of yt and Tik Tok, but rather the people who decide to watch these things instead of moving on?
He kept coming up when my kid watched YouTube. I sat through a few before I started blocking them.
Everyone is entitled to their opinion. Personally I'm pretty sure its all fake. The reactions are not quite right for people winning so much money. I'm pretty sure I've seen some of the winners as extras in other videos. He got caught handing out fake money which he claimed was for "security".
If you were Mr Beast would you really give away $500k plus the costs of spending a full 100 days of filming when you could just get some actors to do it in a week?
Especially when you would get the same view count either way.
From watching a couple of interviews, things I've picked up - when his youtube videos were grossing $20-30k a month he started hiring people and said he hires about 1 person per month since then. He has a teams of accountants, editors, producers, etc. He decided early on to have videos translated but would hire premier voice actors in countries, like someone that voice acted Batman to do his voice. He has an obsessed culture of making the best videos. He built a huge studio and lives there.
I see many similarities to what I've read about startup founders and a growth mindset. If anything, there are some huge marketing lessons to be learned from how he runs his business. I would love to see an experienced interviewer with knowledge of the business world/startups interview him.