> Your goal here is to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible. That’s the number one goal of this production company. It’s not to make the best produced videos. Not to make the funniest videos. Not to make the best looking videos. Not the highest quality videos.. It’s to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible.
Replace "youtube videos" with whatever the company is trying to achieve. I see it all the time in large organizations, where different teams forget what the goal of the company is and instead get hyperfocused on their teams KPI's to the detriment of the company as a whole.
Lawyers finding problems and trying to stop things from happening instead of finding solutions. Security blocking things and not suggesting alternatives. IT blocking this or that instead of trying solve problems, etc.
Some counterpoints:
- Xerox knowingly didn't fix the problematic gear trains to guarantee periodic part changes, prioritizing money over "best copier possible".
- Ford didn't fix Pinto's fuel tank, prioritizing cost minimization over "best possible car in its class".
- Microsoft is did tons of shady things in its OS development history to prioritize domination over "best OS possible", sometimes actively degrading the good features and parts of its OS.
- Dyson's some batteries are notorious for killing themselves via firmware on slight cell imbalance instead of doing self-balancing. Dyson prioritize "steady income via killing good parts early" instead of "building the best vacuum possible".
- Many more electronic and electromechanical systems are engineered with short lives to prioritize "minimizing costs and maximizing profit" over "building the best X possible".
- Lastly, Boeing's doing all kinds of shady stuff (MCAS, doors, build quality, etc.) since they prioritize "maximize shareholder value" over "building the best planes possible".
- ...and there's Intel, but I think the idea is clear here.
By being best YOUTUBE videos it means to focus on whatever appeals to the algorithm. It doesn't mean you are better informed, or better entertained, as long as the click-through-rate is great and the minutes people watch the video is maximized.
You could say the same thing is true for Xerox, for them the best doesn't necessary mean that they sell you the best most reliable copier, but the highest grossing product, with a guaranteed post-sale income.
And this is why we can't have nice things.
It was all going great, until suddenly some new company showed up and started taking their customers. Their new competitor's software was a mess with all sorts of incomplete or pure vaporware features.... but they did get features out fast.
They got beat out by Salesforce...
We as people pick the winners with our money, we don't really want nice things.
We do generally want nice things, but we can't be experts in all the things. In markets where you have mostly responsible actors, that can work out fine. But absent effective regulation or other feedback mechanisms, in many markets an actor who only cares about short-term cash extraction can beat out the people focused on long-term value by taking advantage of consumer ignorance.
A good example here is food. Before the rise of industrial meat production, you would process meat yourself or buy it from a local butcher. You had a lot of information about the meat because the processing chain was short and local. You knew the people touching your food and could smell how clean they kept the butcher shop.
But scaling that up created a lot of opacity. Suddenly it was much harder to know what went into your sausage. It was tens, hundreds, thousands of people involved, spread over many miles. Some dubious people took advantage, and so we ended up with food standards like the Federal Meat Inspection Act. [1] The system that grew out of that works pretty well; things Boar's Head recently killing 9 people [2] are surprisingly rare.
For things less risky than safety, I think a lot of good is done by people like Consumer Reports and Wirecutter. Less ignorance about which products are really good is less room for bad actors to exploit consumers. If people really didn't want nice things, those would be much less popular. Instead, I think they're a sign that people do want nice things, but just have an awful lot to do, and so can't spend much time on a single purchasing decision unless it's a really big deal for them.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Meat_Inspection_Act, with a nod to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_listeriosis...
Counter-point: People complain a lot about leg-room on airplanes. They say they'll pay more for leg room. However, it's very well known (empirically) that they won't pay. People want the cheapest seat - period.
Leg room is very transparent. Consumers can't be fooled. People may want nice things, but they won't pay for it.
Mr. Beast is just giving people what they empirically want.
One is that leg room isn't particularly transparent. If I search for flights, the price is much more visible than a leg room measure. Two, people can certainly be fooled; for a long time airlines have been playing a game of gradually ratcheting back amenities without being up front about it. This is the same game that consumer packaged goods companies play with apparent package size. Three, people pay for more leg room all the time. Last I booked a flight, about half the plane was first class, business class, economy plus, or exit rows. Personally, I sometimes pay for it and sometimes don't. When I don't, it's sometimes because I resent how grossly extractive airlines have gotten.
I also think "empirically want", however cute it is as a linguistic trick, is not particularly accurate. Is it what gets him paid? I'd believe it. Is it what they watch? Sometimes, for some people! But pretending that short-term behavior is equivalent to what somebody really wants is choosing to ignore a great deal. It's like saying alcoholics "want" to drink themselves to death.
However most concretely, back in 2000, American removed a few rows of coach across its entire narrow body fleet to give passengers an extra 3-5 inches of legroom throughout coach. They did not recover the costs and walked it back. jetBlue provides more legroom through all of coach, and even I as a very tall person, don't go out of my way to book them.
Some people will pay more for extra legroom, and I think the current split of seating in planes is likely right around the optimal distribution based on who will and won't pay.
> Two, people can certainly be fooled; for a long time airlines have been playing a game of gradually ratcheting back amenities without being up front about it.
Kind of but not really. Yeah they're not going to put out a press release when they take the olives off your salad. Airlines are an incredibly low margin commodity business. Many years they're negative margins. American's current operating margin is 3.41% [1] This is typical. These aren't B2B SaaS margins we're talking about.
So generally when they take the olives off your salad, instead of putting out a press release they just lower fares on competitive routes. Because most people book on fare or based on corporate contract, which is a second-order effect of fare.
[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAL/american-airli...
You write this in a tone of contradiction, but as far as I can tell we're describing the exact same thing. I understand why the airlines do it, but it doesn't change what customers experience.