> Do not leave consteatants waiting in the sun (ideally waiting in general) for more than 3 hours. Squid game it cost us $500,000 and boys vs girls it got a lot of people out. Ask James to know more
Mr Beast throwing out viral video ideas sounds like the Family Guy joke generator from South Park[0].
Doing a quick web search, it seems several people have made idea generators based off his formula.
I personally don't/wouldn't do this, but I can't ignore the money making machine youtube has become / the producers of said videos.
Come up with contrived BS that caters to younger audiences, micromanage anyone who is holding you up, and attempt to game a blackbox algorithm on a site you don't pay for (YouTube)
The whole modern social media / influencer sphere seems like a huge bubble that will pop eventually. Google has already started wiping inactive accounts[0] presumably because storage isn't truly infinite or cheap. I imagine YT will also take the same path eventually.
0: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/12418290?hl=en
On the other side, Mr Beast:
> Your goal here is to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible. That’s the number one goal of this production company. It’s not to make the best produced videos. Not to make the funniest videos. Not to make the best looking videos. Not the highest quality videos.. It’s to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible. Everything we want will come if we strive for that. Sounds obvious but after 6 months in the weeds a lot of people tend to forget what we are actually trying to achieve here.
e.g. if someone is your bottleneck make them aware, give them a due date, check in regularly, in person comms is better than written etc.
> In general the more extreme the better.
I may be sounding like "get off my lawn" guy right now but should there be some realization that these people are a cultural analogue of if not heroin than at least cigarettes? They are making a good living from making things objectively worse in a society by tickling the base instincts of the addicts. I am not calling for government intervention or any of such BS but is it too much for me to expect at least some cultural pushback here?
> CTR is basically how many people see our thumbnail in their feeds divided by how many that click it.
That's actually 1/CTR.
Another example of math fluency not being required for success at the top.
The relatively higher production cost warrants hyper optimization (as an org) and demands high agency (of producers).
> younger audiences
Internet is so vast in that making something for the 0.1% is still an audience of millions.
I’ve studiously avoided building on platforms, but very different mindset to decided to be the best player on that platform.
Lesson learned: don’t make it about something else. Win the algo.
This sounds to me a lot like the idea in software engineering of being “blocked on” something. I wonder what jargon other fields use for the same concept. Could be cool to have a table cross-referencing jargon across fields, haha.
There's a growing sentiment that a lot of social media is more bad than good for us. But people don't just stop with a behaviour that they know is bad for them. We need a lot more to change a behaviour that has become established.
It's not clear if YouTube is specifically profitable, because Alphabet only separates revenue, not profit. But, I would imagine they're not running huge margins or even at a loss given their recent crackdown on ad-blockers and Google's overall fight against them with things like manifest V3.
It will generate a ton of attention. Who cares if it’s bad?
Excellent.
Compared to that, Mr. Beast is fine art, worthy of the Louvre.
Maybe it’s a fake or a deliberate release, but it doesn’t read like the at to me. There is a ton of commercially sensitive information in here. Not to mention that note about the expensive squid game incident which I doubt they would have included in a document for public consumption.
I don’t think MrBeast needs to farm for attention outside of his current very successful video tactics.
It’s inevitable that every business changes with time. And on a long enough horizon collapse is inevitable. But that doesn’t make it a bubble.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goal_(novel) [2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17255186-the-phoenix-pro...
If someday YT decides to pull the plug on MrBeast, he might start singing a different tune. Or not, I mean, his millions and millions of dollars will probably make him feel better.
It paid off for Mr. Beast.
Maybe it will pay off for you, or maybe you will get banned before you make enough to retire or create another company. This is prime example of survivorship bias.
Wow! There is a lot of bad faith in this comment. This is hacker news, not X, can you please be more thoughtful here?
That quote reads like its reminding people that youtube and a youtube production company job is not where you go to make art house silent films.
Why is this BS? It wouldn't be unheard of to pass stricter age restriction laws so that at least the kids are not so easily exposed to brain damage. Same thing with the drugs you mentioned.
I don't like coffee but I still might learn about the business since it's so big.
Your larger question of “why haven’t they made things I don’t personally find appealing illegal yet?” is worthy of exploration, though I don’t think many posters here are in a position to dig into it deeply for you
But sometimes you want to eat a soggy kebap and not a Michelin-star gourmet meal, and that's fine too (and I can't stand people who malign what other people enjoy because it's "not pure enough").
I have really no respect for the people that abuse a broken status quo to only improve their own personal standing. The fact that a lot of HNers seem to look up to Mr. Beast is almost as tellingly acerbic as the reliance on Steve Jobs for intelligent business quotes.
If 100's of millions of people are watching something, then clearly it has entertainment value.
His management philosophy might rub people the wrong way but it's hard to dispute it's effectiveness. Nor do you have to work there.
His success is all the more impressive given he started with nothing and how competitive the space is.
On some level he's the personification of the youtube algorithm - don't blame him, he's just giving people what they want. On some level this feels like the same outcry parents had to video games in the 90's.
Before teenagers were looking up to YouTubers, they were looking up to TV celebs, musicians, sports players, and so on. You had entire publishing empires built around following such celebs around and reporting on their private lives.
I don't think this is hugely different. The tech has evolved and the formulas have been perfected, but it's still catering to the same obsessions and urges that we had for a good while.
“… instead of starting with his house in the circle that he would live in, we bring it in on a crane 30 seconds into the video. Why? Because who the fuck else on Youtube can do that lol.”
Thankfully there are still enough channels which are not that optimized.
But I wonder: How would the scene of Youtubers cope, if Youtube suddenly changes its algorithm to something completely different? I remember the tears in SEO-land, when Google did it.
And while I don’t think either can be made explicitly illegal without some pretty nasty second-order effects on freedom of expression, we can’t expect the likes of Google to provide a social fix here. Government will need to take note, label, and activate against this at some level. The TikTok ban means we’ve noticed this can be dangerous at least when rival nation-states are involved, but the call is coming from inside the house.
Building your software to depend on Google API's and then be banned from Google would put you in deep trouble, building on Google systems but not relying on their API would still allow for an migration.
Now, the question why the larger US (or English-speaking) culture isn't uniformly doing the same is much more interesting, but there's no known reason for this and most of the common explanations are both somewhat political, and not backed up by much evidence, so discussion often degenerates to talking about why your theory is more plausible.
I wish we knew.
There are many, many, videos that are literally the adult version of baby videos -- ex. Squeezing rainbow colored Play-Doh through a sieve, really bizarre just pure visual attention hacking.
Your comment reminds me that's the local optima for YouTube x creators and it's just sort of contracting the work of actually producing content out. It doesn't care what it is. Just hours consumed.
The abuse of FOIA for police bodycam content published with light commentary... Zoom court sessions enabled turning judges into stars on a show they have no part of it...
1. KPIs, for Beast they are CTR, AVD, AVP, will look different if you are a startup. I am willing to bet he knows his metrics better than >95% of startup founders. Because he is literally hacking/being judged by an algorithm, his KPIs will matter more and can be closely dissected. Startups aren't that easy in that sense, but KPIs still matter.
2. Hiring only A-players. Bloated teams kill startups.
3. Building value > making money
4. Rewarding employees who make value for the business and think like founders/equity owners, not employees.
5. Understanding that some videos only his team can do, and actively exploiting and widening that gap.
The management/communication stuff is mostly about working on set/dealing with physical scale. You need a lot more hands dealing with logistics, which requires hardline communication and management. In startups, the team is usually really lean and technical, so management becomes more straightforward.
I am also getting some bad culture vibes from the PDF and really dislike the writing style. I think it's important not to micromanage to the extent he is--it's necessary, maybe, for his business. Not for startups. Interesting perspective, reminds me of a chef de cuisine in a cutthroat 90s kitchen. The dishes (videos) have to be perfect, they require a lot of prep and a lot of hands, and you have to consistently pump them out.
It's almost like the situation of buggy hardware implementations of networking protocols being so prevalent that software has to adapt to it, and vice versa, leading to lots of silly non-compliant (or non-optimal) behavior because it's disadvantageous to fix your behavior before upstream/downstream fixes theirs.
I think the better ways to fix this would be either gradual change, carefully-crafted regulation, or a new platform entirely that's not owned by an ad company.
But, what's the alternative?
For example, I love 3brown1blue videos. But, it is too advanced even for my eleven year old.
Mark Rober videos are great, and my kids love them, but he's even inside MrBeast's orbit. And, he's not putting out as much content.
What are the good channels that create creative and stimulating videos that are a benefit to humanity.
Does YouTube kill those channels?
It’s also the case that people can succeed in spite of their management philosophies. If you only look at the people who have made it you miss out on all the people who tried similar approaches and did not, which is needed to figure out the effectiveness of a strategy before adopting it. Classic example are people trying to be like Steve Jobs who are not successful.
And on the value side - There are a lot of exploitive ways to hook people, and you can think something is exploitive / a local minima, without being an elitist.
Mr. Beast specifically seems fine to me in a similar way that porn is fine. I don’t think it crosses over to exploitive, but I don’t think it’s crazy to make that argument and I don’t think people are primarily motivated by sour grapes or jealousy.
In the novel, you get to see the characters bang their heads against these "paradoxes" again and again until it sinks in.
But we still have good non story-driven AAA games.
We don't need to falsely pretend that those guys are interesting in any way... we should teach our kids to see through the bullshit, and ask to be less efficient, and more kind
That’s one of the things I find so interesting about this document: it does feel very honest and unfiltered, and as such it appears to be quite an accurate insight into their culture.
And that’s a culture that works if you want to create massive successful viral YouTube videos targeting their audience.
How much has that specific chosen culture contributed to their enormous success in that market? There’s no way to know that, but my hunch is it contributed quite a bit.
Nah, you didn't. You're the parent, if you don't like the content, don't let your kids watch it.
The world has real problems... called environmental collapse and climate change. Why not working on those
It's actually EASY to make money selling shit. It's HARD to solve a real problem to make everyone's lives better
Apart from that, it's the good old Netflix playbook: empower managers to remove adequate team members with good severance to give space to good team members. The danger is letting it deteriorate into stack ranking if you are not careful with the deleterious effect on team work associated.
- Making good YOUTUBE videos is paramount, not quality videos
- Be quirky and crazy in videos using a blank check
- If something goes awry or you need it faster, also use a blank check
- Some advice related to thumbnails and titles (relying on YouTube's current algorithm which could change the next second)
The only thing I found semi useful is how he classifies employees using the A, B and C system (e.g. A is top tier, B can be trained to be top tier, and C is dead weight)
I think this is a really interesting document, despite having very few lessons I would adopt for my own work (as I said at the bottom of the post).
I would be thrilled to read documents providing a level of cultural and operational detail like this from ANY company.
Another one I find really interesting is the 37signals handbook: https://basecamp.com/handbook
Good question. I'm also on the lookout for quality content for my kids. I recently learned that YouTube Kids can be put into whitelist-only mode, and that specific channels, videos, or collections of channels can be picked individually. Google aren't making it easy, but the option is there.
> Does YouTube kill those channels?
I don't think it's about YouTube. Mr Beast is good at what he does, and manages to produce very marketable content. It's fast-food entertainment. It's a newer take on what's been on our TV screens for decades in the form of reality TV and game shows.
(Sorry, my mistake: the page 19 bit is indeed “no does not mean no” which is unfortunate wording given a current scandal! The scandal I referred to is the one about leaving contestants in the sun for three+ hours)
https://ourworldindata.org/which-countries-smoke-most
I think social media lands somewhere between tobacco and sugar. We don't need tobacco. We need carbohydrates but not refined sugar. Social media can be useful sometimes, but is often a disservice. The feeling of usefulness probably makes it more addictive than smoking. At least for me.
This is the new type of cable television and it's free. Yea sure I pay it with my data but at least I don't need to spit out money every month to watch it.
>I have really no respect for the people that abuse a broken status quo to only improve their own personal standing.
Again, entertainment on YouTube is free....even YouTube stopped bothering me to disable my ad-blocker so MrBeast is not getting a penny from me. I might buy YouTube Premium at some point in the future tho.
You see this across industries. Even Google, in the early days, was people working crazy hours, sweating the details, and just generally grinding. It is something like a law of nature that extraordinary results require extraordinary effort from extraordinary people.
You both are right and wrong in a way. Parent poster who only had negative things to say is totally out of touch.
And nothing wrong with some entertainment videos, some leisure is good. It doesn't need to be all educational.
I've watched a few MrBeast videos and similar content, out of curiosity. It just does not appeal to me, in the same way that "influencer" content and celebrities don't.
However, it’s not just about learning. People are easily influenced by the author of what they’re learning from. They’ll read a Steve Jobs autobiography and learn some interesting business insights, but also hold him in higher regard and perhaps feel like it’s ok to be a raging asshole. People look up to successful people.
It’s entirely appropriate to remind people that it’s not all sunshine and rainbows and perhaps this person has toxic effects they need to be aware of.
> why haven’t they made things I don’t personally find appealing illegal yet
You are not good at reading, are you? I specifically said "I am not calling for government intervention or any of such BS" because I knew you are around and you are going to maliciously misunderstand me. But I guess the joke is on me since you didn't even bother to read that part.
And therein lies "the problem" - this shit is garbage. I like some YouTube content too, but holy fucking cow is it worse than everything that came before it. TVFilthyFrank was just doing the same thing Jackass did with fewer safety considerations and lower production value. Historians making documentaries are basically recouping the task of The History Channel on a smaller budget with fewer regulations on construing truth. At the end of the day, as much as I hate cable television, I cannot honestly say anything on YouTube comes close to the production in an episode of Top Gear or Game of Thrones. It's garbage all the way down, supported by marginal advertising, kept out of Google's Graveyard by horrific levels of rentseeking and AdSense monopoly abuse, and ultimately propelled by sensationalist and meaningless content tailored to offend as few people as possible. Content on YouTube is terrible in new and terrifying ways.
Diffusion at the edge is going to change a lot of things. Especially since it won't have to encode to linear formats.
I think it's pretty clear he has figured out how to "master" YouTube better than anyone else ever has by a very wide margin.
So if he doesn't micromanage, how can he teach people how to do something that nobody else has ever figured out how to do?
It's not like people will show up and be good at what he wants. There is no school for this, no "Here's my past experience". None of that matters at his level of success.
With some rewording this would be perfect for the USP slide of an investor deck
Because the cure would be way worse than the disease. Both parties don't have my best interest in mind, but only one party has the power to ruin my life. I am not inclined to add to that power any more that it is absolutely necessary. And we're so far beyond that point that any addition at this point is extremely suspect.
As with most things it’s likely a bit of both. But deep down I suspect it’s mostly the market demanding trash.
More startups should be this transparent about their stated/desired culture (even if unintentionally).
That is simple to do but not something many companies want to do. Just give employees equity via mutualisation. (Real ownership not discourse ownership)
It’s not just broad appeal, but the mass reach of YouTube, the audience targeting and tight feedback loop it enables, and the resulting race to the bottom for who can make the most stupid and/or shocking videos, which in turn informs the tastes of the masses. Where does it end? Will it eventually get to the point that the only profitable YouTube channels are MrBeast-style because nothing else can bring in views?
The GP never said this. They didn't say it was good because it made money, they said it was good because people like it and watch it. I like it and watch it. I agree with the GP.
Restoration and repair videos could be a good choice, although there's also plenty of fake clickbait content there too now. I usually actively avoid content with sensationalised titles and look for smaller non-profit creators.
I had been thinking about this as learning ability (fluid intelligence) and institutional knowledge both following a power law distribution. Mr. Beast refers to A and B players as being sufficiently high in learning ability and only differing in their position in the institutional knowledge distribution.
Packaging this effect into a 3 category model definitely makes it easier to operationalize. The severance part is important too, since there would be hesitancy to terminate even obvious "C players".
There are many people who I consider successful that have never earned 700 mil, and there are people who made billions I don't give a fuck about.
That is, most programmers aren’t good programmers, most managers aren’t good managers, most salaries aren’t good salaries, most salespeople aren’t good salespersons, most workflows aren’t efficient, most team communications aren’t effective.
If Dan Luu is right, it shouldn’t take extraordinary effort to do better (excepting the case where “trying” is extraordinary). If he’s wrong why does it take Herculean effort to outdo a bunch of average companies?
all these things are just convenient timeskip tools.
>Content on YouTube is terrible in new and terrifying ways.
Most of the YouTube's content is amateur UGC(user generated content) and it works pretty well for what it is.
what are some resources that you can learn on how to create viral titles on existing content?
They do sometimes convey interesting messages and they are well produced and captivating but they lack soul. I think about films like "Forest Gump". Personally, I really liked the film, maybe other people didn't like it as much but I found it to be unique and culturally enriching. I'm not even American but I could relate. Modern "movies" usually don't have enough character development; or if they do, it's highly generic. Any character development in modern movies is focused on making the character relatable to the most common denominator among the masses so they lack individuality.
It's even telling that we have separate words "film" and "movies". It reminds me of the book "Brave New World" which is set in the future; they have something called "Feelies" which is described as a complete visual and sensory experience but they don't teach you anything; they are all focused on very narrow physical experiences. Everything in BNW is designed in a way to reduce people's awareness and reduce diversity of thought to the point that they never think to ask certain questions.
Hard disagree. Is he making the most profitable, most clicked, or most viral videos? Maybe. That’s objectively quantifiable and I’ll give you that. But “best” is very subjective. I wouldn’t give a rat’s ass if Mr Beast stopped making videos and deleted his account today. His videos are the audiovisual equivalent of junk food: not good for you; negatively addictive; and big shady business.
Give me Folding Ideas any day. Now those are some quality and entertaining videos. The kind I save up to savour with some wine. That’s my definition of best. Yours will differ, but that’s the point.
As I understand it, MrBeast helped fund the creation of ViewStats [0] in order to gather more data on thumbnails and channel / video performance over time. Then this knowledge is applied to their own content in order to make it even more successful. At this point there's probably multiple people who specialize just in thumbnail optimization.
Another key detail about MrBeast production is that they target a global audience, so they hire famous voice actors of every major language to do their voice-overs. A few years before YouTube supported multiple audio tracks, they had different channels for various languages and regions. Now it's just a drop-down in the video settings. Many products fail to take internationalization and localization seriously, so their products are unable to penetrate non-western markets.
Speaking of international reach, I saw in an interview a few years back that MrBeast was trying to expand to the Chinese market, but none of his public interviews since then have discussed how he's doing there. This goes a bit against the extreme focus on YouTube as his primary platform. A quick search on bilibili (which I believe is the Chinese equivalent of YouTube), shows his latest video hitting 1.6 million views and 8k comments, which isn't bad but it doesn't really compare to the amount of attention that he gets on YouTube. It seems like even the most skilled content creators in the West still struggle to break into the Chinese market.
- how programmers actually review code
- 3D Printed Latch Mechanism
- I Always Thought This Border Was Straight (about a border in australia)
- You need to go to a “better” place! (rescue of an injured raptor)
I think YouTube is a lot like twitter (5 years ago), in that what you view and follow affects what you're fed.
Weird how things that seem to make sense in one context seem to make no sense in another context. If you told me a factory runs their widget making machine at 70% capacity in case someone comes along with an order for a different widget or twice as many widgets, at first glance think that's a bad idea. If your customers can keep your widget machine 100% full, using only part of the machine for the chance that something new will come along seems wasteful. And through cultural osmosis the idea of not letting your hardware sit idle is exactly the sort of thing that feels right.
And yet, we do this all the time in IT. If you instead of a widget machine told me that you run your web server at 100% capacity all the time, I'd tell you that's also a terrible idea. If you're running at 100% capacity and have no spare headroom, you can't serve more users if one of them sends more requests than normal. Even though intuitively we know that a machine sitting idle is a "waste" of compute power, we also know that we need capacity in reserve because demand isn't constant. No one sizes (or should size) their servers for 100% utilization. Even when you have something like a container cluster, you don't target your containers to 100% utilization, if for no other reason than you need headroom while the extra containers spin up. Odd that without thinking that through, I wouldn't have applied the same idea to manufacturing machinery.
As though startups are trying to hire mediocre people instead of having no choice.
And that 95% of startups don't know their metrics. Pretty sure almost all do but again don't have the skills or resources to meaningfully move them.
Couple that with regulations that require the companies to give greater control to the user over video feed customisation and I think it's possible to reign in the arms race for attention.
- not everything is worth doing extraordinarily as no one will pay for excellence of some services or goods
- being exceptionally good at something doesn’t guarantee someone will buy from you, people might just don’t like you or your branding
- there are bunch of other market forces that you have to overcome and Dan seems like was writing about being 95% on a single thing
Well he is in the middle of a PR push responding to the claims from former employees that he fakes his videos and is generally fraudulent
You could say that about literally any shady business. Imagine seeing a PDF proving tobacco leaders knew for decades that it caused cancer and saying what you did.
Being monetarily successful does not mean you’re good or shouldn’t be criticised.
The younger generation always has been, and always will be, totally so much worse than the older generation.
Kids I know find all sorts of things ridiculously amusing and entertaining and it all seems stupid, brainless and mind rotting to me. But then again, the stuff I found ridiculously amusing and entertaining at that age was (I can attest, having gone back and watched some of it) was just as stupid, brainless and mind rotting. Some of it is not having a "sufficiently developed palette" for humor and entertainment. Some of it is because that humor and entertainment was genuinely new to me at the time, where as now I've seen it before so when it shows up in the kids stuff, it's not entertaining anymore. It's sort of the reverse of the "Seinfeld isn't funny" issue. We're not looking at something in the past and wondering why it was so great because it's been out shadowed by what it inspired. Instead we're looking at something from today and wondering why it's entertaining because we've been entertained in the same way in the past.
It’s like going to the store to buy fun. It doesn’t work that way. Excitement and wonder occur organically and typically in real life, and at the very least as the product of something truly awesome. In the case of Mr Beast, it seems like the ostensible happiness and excitement of the crew and contestants is combined with money to convince viewers something really great is happening. But it’s simply not. It’s vapid and fluffy, and really loud and obnoxious.
But I also feel a bit like Mr Skinner wondering if I’m out of touch. Yet… This stuff probably would have weirded me out as a teenager, too.
Mr. Beast has one goal: Eyes on content. For a long as possible. There is no artistic vision - every decision is made in the name of profit, attention, and addiction.
The fact that a shady business used some tactics to advance its cause doesn't automatically condemns the means.
Wine is toxic for your health. You think Mr. Beast is junk food based on an opinion while wine is scientifically proven to be garbage for your body. Yet here you are watching educational videos while downing liquid poison. You do more damage to yourself than watching a Mr. Beast video and not drinking wine.
The difference between you and people who watch Mr. Beast is raw snobbery. Sheesh. If you don’t understand why someone would watch a video purely for mindless entertainment and no educational value I don’t think you understand humans or how humans work.
Which is always bad.
The alternative is grabbing The Little Prince or My Neighbor Totoro and watching or reading it with the kids. I have a very simple rule, if something isn't good enough to be engaging for parents and kids just throw it the hell out. It reminds me of a discussion between a Japanese coworker and an American expat. The Japanese guy was disgusted by lunchables, and the expat went "oh yeah, they're just for kids", and he just said "you feed your kids something you wouldn't eat yourself"?
Stop normalizing feeding garbage to children, metaphorically or literally. There's enough stimulating media in the world outside of Youtube.
He's making low value content/the culture of the company is horrible/he's a fraud/it's more luck than skill. The actual critiques are personalized to the content and, to one extent or another, valid, but the social purpose of the critiques is universal which is that I felt uncomfortable that reading this might mean I have to re-evaluate my worldview and I'm going to dive into the comment section and upvote all the people telling me actually, I don't have to do that.
I actually spent over an hour writing 750+ words of my takeaways reading this document and shared it privately with a few founder friends of mine and I briefly considered also posting to share with the community but I took a look at the comments and took a look at what I wrote and decided I didn't have the energy to face the endless onslaught of nitpicks and misunderstandings that are driven, at the end of the day, not by a genuine intellectual desire to reach an understanding, but by the need to prove emotionally that others are not taking this seriously so I don't have to either.
All I can do is be vague and say I think this was an enormously valuable piece of writing that is worth engaging seriously for what it is as it might change your worldview in several important ways.
But also my larger meta-point is that there's a now near ubiquitous "sour grapes" attitude that's pervaded HN that makes it an extremely unpleasant place to hold a conversation and people reading should be aware of this systematic bias when reading comments here.
Looking back at 7 companies I worked at: they all had a tough hiring filter to get in. But most of them also had not that great people that they were not firing.
Firing people is hard even when you know you should do it. You have to be a heartless bastard to not have a problem firing people.
It's even worse when the company gets so big that a game of building empires starts in which case managers have an incentive to grow headcount to grow power, even if that headcount isn't very good.
The document even talks about what MrBeast considers a B-player.
Made a mistake once? That's fine. Fuck ups are a price of ambition.
Made the same mistake twice? Need to be told the same thing multiple times? Not an A player so fired.
In manufacturing, you keep spare capacity to allow for more lucrative orders to come in. If you don't expect any, you run at 100%. For instance when Apple pays TSMC all the money in the world to produce the next iPhone chip, they won't be running that line at 70%, the full capacity is reserved.
Or if you're a bakery, you won't keep two or three cake cooking spots just on case someone comes in witb an extraordinary order, you won't make enough on that to cover the lost opportunity.
We run our servers at 70% or even 50% capacity because we don't have control on what that capacity will be used for, as external events happen all the time. A manufacturers receiving a spike of extra orders can just refuse them and go on with their day. Our servers getting hit with 10x the demand requires efforts and measures to protect the servers and current traffic.
Factories want to optimize for efficiency, server farms want to pay for more reactivity, that's the nature of the business.
McDonalds: exploits hunger by conditioning you to desire convenient, unhealthy, and ultimately unsatisfying food.
TikTok: exploits your dopamine to condition you to watch content, keeping you entertained with new quick doses constantly.
You can pick almost any major company and find some way they exploit someone else.
It's important to note it's not about individual feeds, but the basins that algorithmic content settles in given the data they have.
As things evolve, they optimize for brutally efficient production. "true crime" starts as "NPR award-winning podcast phenomena" and very quickly come to mean a swath of "DUI arrest" videos.
That's because the initial click, averaged across all of us, is *hyper*optimized for a thumbnail with an attractive scantily clad young female saying COPS DAUGHTER THROWS TANNTRUM AFTER BLOWING 0.24! It's not about individuals, or individuals feeds, it's about these niches get hyperdominated by nonsense because that's what best practice is. c.f. document's comments re: thumbnails vs. mine.
Note also, for instance, the curious absence of any programmer influencers making anywhere near the views of pretty much any other topic on YouTube. t3.gg is the top in software engineering videos by a mile, and they pull in 1/10th of what a bodycam video does.
Ban YouTube. Have only 1 movie/TV night.
Mandate books as primary entertainment.
Stock the home library with classic tales of heroism and adventure. Own an encyclopedia set.
Reject the brainshinker system and look to works of more enduring worth.
Videos should be thoughtful. If that's not possible in the family dynamic, shut it down.
What are your takeaways?
Thoughts on Tate's Hustlers' University?
I urge you to attempt to engage with arguments as they are made, not with a version created in your head that vilifies the other person.
Finally, I wish you a calm and peaceful week, with no conflicts and all the YouTube videos you wish to gorge yourself upon, as long as the habit isn’t detrimental to you or others in any way.
EDIT: My pet theory is that it has to do with the general aging of the users here. There's a kind of well-to-do, Western, mid-40s (usually male) social opinion I see upvoted a lot here that I feel like hits the sweet spot of the folks who still read this site regularly. But it's just a theory really.
Tactics such as returning offers are specifically made to encourage people to pick up gambling addictions. Regulations are skirted by companies like Stake, allowing customers to skirt restrictions easily with a VPN and lax KYC. Their massive presence in sports as sponsors help them advertise to not just adults but children who engage with sports as well, a fact that I'm sure these operators love.
While Mr Beast might use tactics that could be construed as similar, or tries to hit KPI which are similar to those used by casinos, I'm quite sure that Mr Beast video addictions do not lead to thousands of suicides a year, and that fact alone leads me to think that it is in fact obvious that Mr Beast is not as far out ethically as casinos.
Get real.
I thought it was an interesting behind the scenes look at how seriously they take their “art” but nothing world changing. Which part of the article did that for you?
My view is, you need to educate parents (backed by solid peer reviewed etc studies), and give them the tools (and free time) to help their kids. Most parents I know are too busy working to put food on the table to spend time encouraging their kids not to watch trash tv/youtube.
In the US in the past few decades? Yes. Absolutely.
Going back to at least the 1990s a kid could watch cartoons before school and then for several hours afterwards on broadcast channels.
For households with basic cable there were also very popular networks running all day full of children’s content (Disney Channel, Nickelodeon etc.)
These networks were very successful because they excelled at grabbing attention and keeping eyeballs on screens. For one example of these corners of hyper-popular children’s entertainment that kept kids glued to screens before YouTube just look at the works of Dan Schneider. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Schneider
I'm not saying Mr.Beast is even that bad but spare us the patronizing attitude at least.
"Just hire good employees, why did no one think of this before!"
...seriously?
> It feels like the tech industry is having a moment where a lot of us are looking critically at the work we're doing and the effects it has on the society we live in.
I think you grossly overestimate HN's prominence in the tech industry. It was where all the founders hung out 15 years ago. It's now just a place where IT workers talk.
> Sometimes that's not fun but it is important. Sorry if that checks the vibes too much for you.
No I just do what everyone else does which is talk about tech elsewhere. I spent a lot of time over the last 15 years here so I'm sad that the place has changed, but at the end of the day I have several alternatives.
Moreover there's plenty of problems in the world out there. A few wars in progress, a genocide or two. My relatives spent the last few weeks in hiding because a government failed. MrBeast's engagement practices are probably the very lowest of my worries. If only HN comments could change the world...
I try and remember to not HN at the weekend, obviously forget sometimes. I tend to find sticking to Ask HN is better at the weekend.
And then there's the sociological effect of course: are you even any good at identifying poor performers, does the team view it that way? You can be one employee departure away from an exodus since someone being laid off is usually a good sign for everyone else to reconsider how they feel about their position. Bad management is pretty good at generating a never-ending stream of "underperforming employees".
Like let's state the obvious here: you're looking back the 7 prior companies you worked for. Are the people you thought should be fired still there? Are they still turning up every day and doing something? Because in that context, whatever their fault, they are a more reliable resource to the company then you were (this isn't judgment: my resume is long too).
Instead, a trinary should be used, so among true and false, you can have undefined. Or, more importantly for value judgements, "it doesnt matter".
And of course, like things in javasvript, everything should probably just live as undefined, and there should be plenty of guardrails before choosing the other states.
I try pretty hard to only work on companies that have at least a neutral impact on society. Many of them have had an actively positive one.
> I think you grossly overestimate HN's prominence in the tech industry.
It's a good thing I wasn't talking solely about hackernews then.
And that the nitpicking is merely a failure to express that understanding of the world, especially since it seems like pro-status quo commenters don't care to learn more?
I think I'm one of the sour grapes commenters often, and I've very often tried to have patience to explain in depth where my opinions come from. My greatest frustration is trying to describe for instance why someone like Mr Beast is antisocial (as I actually did a long time ago), and then being met by responses like "he's obviously doing something right to get all those views and he's promoting altruism", responses that obviously never bother to understand what my point was.
If think if we really are supposed to improve the quality of discussions, asking more questions should be common when we fundamentally disagree so much. On fundamental disagreements, either the other party is stupid/naive/uninformed or they have fundamentally different principles that we might not understand, and without which a response is just flaming.
Later edit: I actually think the document by Mr Beast is exceptionally well written, and most startups could apply the main lessons from it. I still think his output is extremely antisocial.
MrBeast videos do not get better if everyone uses perfect spelling and grammar. They get better if people figure out and then execute kind of crass but extravagant “wow” moments.
The MrBeast As are rated on their ability to learn - which is surprisingly a characteristic that’s not mentioned in the Welch model.
MrBeast Bs are As who haven’t got there yet - Welch Bs are not expected to get there.
MrBeast Cs are reasonably capable but are missing out on that crucial learning instinct - again, not mentioned by Welch, who has Cs who are incompetent procrastinators.
When you see those really great things here it does restore some faith in the place but they are getting further apart all the time. A real shame.
That is all well and good when you are the golden goose that is Apple. Most people just do not get the opportunity to hire like that.
Not being funny, how often is this the answer:
I didn't have one prior, I'm being told what to think by "smart people" online and I make my identity alignment with them. I'm empty and can't think of anything on my own, so when I read something, I add it to a memory bank to bring up later in life in conversation with others to come across as "knowing a little bit about everything"
This is no different than what's done in ANY entertainment media contract negotiation that takes place with "on-air talent".
My junk food consumption is really just education/science/maker youtube recommendation engine. Yes, I am constantly learning lot of interesting things to a certain level of depth, but I would be better off with only consuming youtube in the evening to wind down and getting things done in the morning and afternoon or diving deep where youtube don't tend to go.
If a startup can't attract talent (a sign of bad traction), that startup probably is not that good and more people won't solve the underlying problem. You would also be surprised how many startups outsource dev/marketing/etc. in their initial stages.
If you can't convince smart people to work for you and that your idea is good, good luck trying to convince customers of the same.
>And that 95% of startups don't know their metrics. Pretty sure almost all do but again don't have the skills or resources to meaningfully move them.
I said most don't know them as well as Mr. Beast. Read "Chapter 1: What makes a Youtube video viral?". Most founders have not put the same amount of time into seeing how to track, measure, and impact metrics. He identified key KPIs and then experimented with changes until he found what worked. His whole north star to, minute by minute, structure each video, is informed by the KPIs. His whole strategy is built upon metrics by metrics.
He clearly is obsessed with them to a degree few are. Some startups don't even know how much money they make, how much money they lose, etc.
Your goal is to convince the audience, not your opponents.
He’s just making videos people will click on and then watch.
It’s almost like he’s trying to make something people want. I’ve heard that before somewhere…
Making videos that click and spread is clearly a skill or everyone would do it.
The brand could start their own complementary platform too.
Not much different than the content becoming its own media network.
Then on the first page of the "silly little book," where I already have the question: "why should I read this? Why would an employee spend time reading this?" Immediately he addresses that: "if you read this book and pass a quiz I’ll give you $1,000." And if you've seen MrBeast videos, it's not inconceivable that everyone who's read the manual has actually received $1,000.
Corporate leaders would do well to learn from just this. What are you saying in the all-hands meeting that takes 1,000 SWE-hours that's actually worth that much? What value does your employee handbook/documentation provide (in my experience, a lot of documentation provides negative value by virtue of being so out-of-date, confusing, or just wrong).
Jimmy has probably done the math (in a intuitive sense; I don't think he has strong math skills), and it's worth the employee-hours for him to pay them $1,000 to read this PDF to avoid having them waste time or make mistakes they've already made. It's probably worth a lot more than $1,000.
The difference is the game he's playing (youtube) is similar to the game we're playing (startups) so the success is tantamount.
The game tobacco companies play is also very different, so the tobacco companies success will teach you very little about being successful in startups.
They refused to shut the lights off for days on end and then coerced the contestant to run a literal marathon on a treadmill... and then there's the sexual abuse allegations high up in his team, hiring a convicted child predator and someone else with a long sexual abuse criminal history, among other things. I'm not sure I would talk his business practices up without directly making some kind of distinction or acknowledgement here.
To be honest I think there's just a bit of a bifurcation between people who do business, like really do business as a competition like an Olympic sport, and people who just sort of like turn up and do their thing for a bit and then go home.
To the former camp all of this is intuitively obvious and doesn't need spelling out although the insights are generally useful.
Or, people are just more likely to see something closer to the top, that inspires them to comment.
Therefore, the top comment in a top page thread is itself a natural comment magnet.
I don't know of an antidote to this, except that I try not to do it myself. And wary of the possibility of a pot-kettle situation here.
I find the lengths he has gone to in order to design his videos specifically for how YouTube works to be extremely impressive.
I was on the set for one of the productions, and I'll just say at the time I thought the experience was a one-off for one of the bigger productions they've put on. Since reading other people's stories, it seems more a case where the pressure to push, push, push for the next big video is a ginormous machine that grinds people pretty hard.
An early stage startup, with a few employees, pushing to hit some milestone, could survive like that a while. But you can only burn through so many creative minds driving them at 110% all day like that. IMO, you have to find a sustainable burn rate that might be too much for some, but isn't going to drive away everyone desiring normal family / outside work life balance, especially 5-10 years into an org's lifetime.
MrBeast (the org) has hundreds of employees and probably 5-10 major active productions (in pre-prod, prod, and post-prod). They've achieved a lot of impressive results, but they also get to cut a lot of corners traditional media (Hollywood, TV production) can't due to labor laws and unions.
Edit: Not to mention, the 'No does not mean no' section was a bit alarming. There are plenty of times when no most certainly means no, and you can really damage business and personal relationships if you can't figure those out.
To master the bend not break model.
You can make a bridge that can handle a 10 ton load for half the material of one that can take 20 tons. 99% of the time this isn't an issue but that outlier case of a 18 ton truck can be disastrous. This is why power cables have sag in them, in case there is an extreme cold snap. Why trees sway and bend with the wind so that anything but the most extreme evens do not break them; with that analogy, grass is much weaker but could handle even higher winds. The ridged are brittle.
I'm not saying to not strive for efficiency but you also have to allow those efficiency gains to provide some slack in the system. Where I work, there is a definite busy season. So for most of the year, we operate at about 70% utilization and it works out great. Most people are not stressed at all. It means that when those 2 months of the year when it is all hands on deck, everyone is in peak condition to face it head on.
In my previous job in manufacturing, efficiency was praised over everything else, it was 100% utilization all of the time. So when the COVID rush came, it practically broke the business. After a year of those unrelenting pace, we started to bleed out talent. Over the next 6 months, they lost all the highest talent. A year later from those I still spoke with, they said they lost about two thirds of their business over the next 12 months, they are now on the edge of collapse.
Slack allows a bend, pure efficiency can lead to a break. There is a fine line between those two that is very difficult to achieve.
I skipped the “no doesn’t mean no” section because it felt like pure hustle culture to me, not to mention something which wouldn’t work outside of MrBeast because they can lean so heavily on their brand - “find an employee who has a kid who is a fan” etc.
I didn’t actually spot the relationship between the “no means no” section and the sexual abuse scandals (I’m apparently not completely up to date on MrBeast scandals) - I caught the bit about squid game and though that would be a useful thing to highlight to remind people that MrBeast’s history isn’t without its nasty incidents.
Meh, just write it well and share, then ignore the feedback. You should really only listen to feedback from smart people that you trust anyway. But I understand your position.
Not to detract from it in any way.
I’ve recently noticed it everywhere. Not just on HN.
Perhaps more importantly though, was my takeaway that it mostly wasn't fraud, it was truly innovative accounting that with hindsight was the wrong idea, but if the world worked out just a bit differently, could have led to them winning the market and taking the financial world in a new direction. It's not obvious to me that the fraud timeline is the only one or even the most likely one, we'll never know.
"History is written by the victors" is what comes to mind here. Or in another way, it's survivorship bias. I haven't read the Mr Beast document yet but I can imagine what's in it because my previous company had similar material (although likely far less controversial), and I'd bet many commenters here have similar culture documents, handbooks, mission statements, and so on, which when read out of context or through the lens of a future scandal could appear far more incriminating than otherwise.
We need to get better at distilling what it is in material like this that is a contributor to the success/failure/scandal, and what... just is... doesn't have an impact, or could have been another way. We need to be better at actually learning from these things in a nuanced way.
If you post something interesting people will read it! Sour grapes comments are kinda boring, and complaints about sour grape comments are also kinda boring.
If you don’t want certain kinds of conversations in a community, one of the best things to do is to “crowd that out” by just offering positive alternatives, with interesting posts.
I have a lot of social complaints about finance, but still love reading about it. Cuz it’s interesting in the abstract!
I don’t disagree that there is some value in this knowledge. But success has different definitions.
I do not consider Jimmy successful. In relation to classical virtues, he hasn’t truly lived up to many. That would be success to me.
He is popular and his business is rich. Some people consider that success, but not all. Not even in business and start-up circles.
Edit: some people below (quite remarkably) miss the point despite me having spelled it out — “success has different definitions”. Somehow they have convinced themselves I said that Jimmy has my definition of success, or that he is not successful by his own definition. I think everyone who wants to understand what I am saying does. If not, I repeat one more time — there is more than one way to measure success. Which is correct or not correct — I do not prescribe. That is all :)
Part of his strategy is copying TV. He famously made a Squid Game episode.
You either missed the point of the GP comment, or you think that it's entirely pointless to discuss important issues unless it's with people of prominence. Depressing if it's the latter, but given how you started your post, I'm leaning toward that interpretation. That's some kind of fucked up elitism right there.
I also find those signs that it’s a more honest document. Most things publicly available are so neutered there’s not much useful grey info
Be the change you want to see! Post your thoughts on the Mr Beast doc as a reply to your first comment and see how it goes.
A coal power plant may be enormously successful. But its costs to climate are equally important.
We often fail to talk about the other side of the coin.
Display comments in random order. Then it becomes possible to add a top level comment and have it not disappear forever into the bottom of the page, forever unseen.
Alternatively, comment as quickly as possible. Ideally, be the first person to comment. Just comment your general thoughts and then fill in everything you wanted to say over a series of edits while simultaneously improving the comment's logic, grammar and spelling. This one goes all the way back to stackoverflow. It's a habit I have never been able to shake to this day because of how active I used to be on that site. Probably contributed to my account getting rate limited here.
I can remember visiting friends houses where there would be multiple television sets (including tv sets in bedrooms) and television would always be turned on, even if no one was watching it. It was like a constant low level background noise. I found it strange but it was normal to them, they were used to eating dinner or playing with legos etc with tv constantly on in the background.
Correction, you can pick any extremely large corporation.
Very large (i.e. successful) exploit people by design. Businesses not willing to exploit people are at a disadvantage and can never be as successful as those that are willing to exploit others.
The fact that you made it to his company is enough incentive for you to go through the onboarding document.
The dichotomy sometimes
not exact match, if i see the bac one again i'll share it.
but this is somewhat typical of the drama, only missing element is a generic slop voiceover that interjects every 2 minutes with two sentences: 1. vague statement about what's happened so far that could apply to any video. 2. "...but they weren't prepared for what happened next!" (nothing crazy ever happens) (except on the 'cop gets arrested for DUI' ones where they think they're gonna get a favor like its 1994 still)
EDIT: this ones a good subtle example of the adult baby video https://www.youtube.com/shorts/jan_KjEZd20
Sure, the argument may go, its entertainment and those would have gotten the same from alternative sources, but in this particular case, viral ready addictive video content is ultimately a bane for society.
This guy has studied 20000 to 30000 of videos, done data analysis on them, and then finetuned his videos to make them popular and earn a lot of money on it. As a business, this is genius, he is talented, he is profitable, his investors are circling around banks. But society has suffered for it.
My kid watches similar pointless videos, and he is on the verge of addiction (any and all free time he has, he jumps to the videos of colorful activity videos on you tube, from chinese or russian channels. He is 10 years old)
I am weaning him off youtube altogether, and involving him in books and other activities, but it is damn hard.
When your "innovative accounting" makes you feel, at some point, that you should be shredding important documents, I think it mostly was actual fraud. You know, criminal behavior.
Let's call it like it is: a bunch of rich, extremely entitled people who decided they should, you know, be more rich by abusing their privilage and positions, and who helped nobody except themselves.
There's nothing admirable there, just another of those lessons that we ignore continually: cockroaches wear suits, and often expensive ones too.
In as far as this is a document that says 'do your best, give 110% 25/8, sacrifice everything for the company', most of what I'm seeing here is the same general approval that latter-day HN gives all impractical advice that a very young person might come up with. ('Just do gooderer, all the time!')
I don't think the change is that people now are now closed-minded, I think it's more that something like Mr Beast's PDF of peppy twenty-something bromides simply wouldn't have made the front page at all in 2014. This would be over on Digg with the other pop-Internet stories.
More broadly, given that the comment section appears around 60-70% positive for Mr Beast, I'm unsure what it is you're actually after. Would you prefer it be 100% positive? Wouldn't that be a huge loss for the intellectual diversity that this site has to offer? Aren't there other, better places for hive takes (e.g. Reddit)?
Respectfully, I think the takes you're taking issue with are precisely the remnants of the old, diverse HN, and the takes you're tacitly encouraging are the monoculture that's taken over the rest of the Internet.
Avoiding one sided content altogether. Any and all video content must be rejected.
Learning to do things from books is the only way we can safeguard the next generation from becoming mind fucked zombies who have lost the cognitive ability to think for themselves.
To the grandparent: if you put in the effort to make yourself more clear, you might get the quality responses you wish for.
Shades of "What You Can't Say"[0].
If I were young and wanted to work in online media production, I would much rather work for Marques Brownlee than for MrBeast.
Given that, it’s pretty clear to me from the full PDF that MrBeast is “gaming” it to the best effect possible given no perfect information.
The thing he cares about is if YouTube is going to recommend his video for people to watch, even beyond his own subscribers.
He believes that the key to this recommendation mechanism is having a high AVD and AVP (defined on page 5). Given that he has the highest rated account on all of YouTube now I’m inclined to defer to his expertise.
Kurzgesagt doesn't have daily videos, but it fits that bill.
They’re not saying it changed their worldview. Their point is that if a person is just immediately nitpicking it and dismissing it, then there’s probably something in it that can change their worldview. That person’s project management and storytelling skills probably suck (because most people’s project management and storytelling skills suck).
Yes, except doesn’t Mr. Beast define the kind of success he’s aiming for in the PDF?
> I do not consider Jimmy successful.
By the definition he set for success or the one you made up?
This is the first line of my paragraph.
This is the second line of my paragraph.
They are separated because HN and Reddit formatting is different.
Less "Hacker" More "Greed via Computer" So the idea that they aren't bothered by Mr Beast's lack of integrity is because they too find deceit acceptable so long as they profit. Because, someone else before him did, so why shouldn't he? It's toxic greed all the way down in this view.
the bizarre social Darwinism nonsense that permeates the internet has done a nice job of taking this antisocial mindset - passersby at a glance recognize it quite rightly as the ideology of the asshole - and rebranded it as 'smart' and a mere recognition of the 'real world' (much to the confusion of people succeeding and enjoying the company of others doing so without robbing one another)
According to this Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-subscribed_YouTub... he finally achieved that goal on June 2, 2024.
So definitely successful by his own chosen metric.
I agree with you on this but I don't think it's a failure. I think people just get tired after a while. They get tired, and then they start displaying their disapproval in ways that require less work.
It's just easier than typing out all those words and being ignored.
> My greatest frustration is trying to describe for instance why someone like Mr Beast is antisocial and then being met by responses that obviously never bother to understand what my point was
It's really tiresome.
At some point you start to realize that you have fundamentally different values than the people you're trying to discuss things with, that these values are irreconcilable and that further argument will just make people hate you instead of convincing them.
This isn't really about "sour grapes", we have moral objections to what others are doing, and there's no point in trying to have those arguments with people who do those things for a paycheck.
Sports = watching grown men play with balls, Games = giving yourself unnecessary problems to solve, TV/Reading = learning (usually) completely useless information
There's a bit of missed irony here that you decrying the 'sour grapes' crowd with 'sour grapes' of your own, and yourself have been upvoted to the top. I do agree this culture of indulged victimhood is really dragging internet discourse down, but you surely can see your own complicity in it?
I don't follow or watch Mr Beast videos, but from what I've seen, they are largely driven by a money fetish and as far as "creativity", it feels on par with the more boring "What would you rather" conversations I had in middle school.
Maybe he has unlocked the key to virality by vigorously analyzing data, but looking at his videos, at a glance, it seems to more be formulaic, predictable, and simply having an actual budget that sets it apart (if it is actually set apart, as I find it hard to tell how much of it is others copying his work versus hius work being unoriginal).
I did go watch a couple Mr. Beast videos. I can see why people knee-jerk about them here. They are just not my cup of tea, and they're not in a way that really rubs me the wrong way. That's OK! I can be convinced that's just a "me" thing! It doesn't matter; I'm not building too much of "don't like Mr. Beast" into my identity.
I take your point, but also get why people might have viscerally negative opinions about this particular subject? I get the frustration with superficial negativity crowding out discussions though.
> "Use Consultants
Consultants are literally cheat codes. Need to make the world's largest slice of cake? Start off by calling the person who made the previous world's largest slice of cake lol. He's already done countless tests and can save you weeks worth of work. I really want to drill this point home because I'm a massive believer in consultants. Because I've spent almost a decade of my life hyper obsessing over YouTube, I can show a brand new creator how to go from 100 subscribers to 10,000 in a month. On their own it would take them years to do it. Consults are a gift from god, please take advantage of them. In every single freakin task assigned to you, always always always ask yourself first if you can find a consultant to help you. This is so important that I am demanding you repeat this three times in your head "I will always check for consultants when I'm assigned a task""I would argue the opposite. Often the comments that OP is describing are people who have very little knowledge of the topic at hand, only strongly held emotional feelings based on some narrative that appeals to their bias.
The problem is, HN is a crowd of people who grew up believing they would all become the next Steve Jobs...a decade or two later, the chips have fallen, and most of us have not become that (yet many have had to watch their former peers become wildly successful). So what we have now is a community of bitter, frustrated, and resentful people hurling those feelings onto whatever the topic of the day is.
Instead of accepting your jealousy and failure to achieve [insert desired outcome], it's much easier to believe that...whomever or whatever becomes successful...is doing so not out of merit, but out of deceit. By placing yourself on a higher moral pedestal, you avoid the pain of direct comparison. Ex: Sure, [insert person or company] is successful, but it's because they prey on [insert moral failing of both the product and the people who desire it]!
As someone who has assiduously avoided watching his videos (because of this opinion), I was impressed by the document because it is incredibly practical. The advice about communication, managing critical components and bottlenecks - very very good.
Of course he is singlemindedly focused on building a massive YouTube channel. In the employee handbook it does not say: we treat you well and do the most ethical thing
It says: come here and work hard, we will make a big YouTube channel. (Not: a YouTube channel that is good for society!! Just big!!)
We have a 10 year old son and best approach we have found is VLC on his ipad and family TV, coupled to a NAS that we drop the content on to (downloaded/ripped shows that contain no ads).
What's this about the Squid Game video and the half a mil lost because of the "waiting in the sun" ? Did someone die ???
The blog post happens to miss a few of the points in the original document that would raise a lot of eyebrows and I'm not sure that it's a fair take on "what it takes to run a massive scale viral YouTube operation" if it lands you in all sorts of management trouble and potentially criminal allegations.
[1]: Of course among other things, but you can't deny he did quite some philanthropy
MrBeast enters a new domain every week so consultants are way more important to him than to a software business.
He has enough budget and fame to, as he says, use the Guinness Word Records book as a phonebook. Or any other resource that records world-famous achievements. So that's one way.
Another is to have friends in the business that can recommend people they worked with.
I'm not sure a third consistent way exists.
Edit: very good technical people can recognize very good people in very different technical fields by their thinking and communication habits. Same for business people I believe. So if you have a wonderful devops employee/consultant and need an ML consultant but have zero idea how to evaluate them, have your devops guy talk to a few candidates and ask him whether they're good technical people.
None of those videos is easy to make.
Sure, it's maybe not great to be so impressed by logistics or supply chain of a tobacco company, but from a business and systems view some of it is interesting
I feel like the Peter Thiel world has eaten the Moxie Marlinspike world, and this is such a huge, monstrous loss for intellectual curiosity, individual liberty, and human flourishing.
I don't think it's just the fact that his videos are expensive click bait where he throws money around... it's the fact that he has some very shady, borderline illegal(maybe actually illegal?) practices. the livestream marketing the chocolate to children to win entries into giveaways that he then scrubs from the internet are probably not legal is one example. there are a few videos on how scummy he is. I think the visceral reaction to him as some kind of genius is warranted.
that said the pdf has some nuggets of wisdom even if it's from a tainted source.
I couldn't tell you whether my surgeon was any good or not leading up to an operation, but if they were bad, I'd sure be able to tell 2 weeks later.
I think it is ultimately up to professionals to have some pride in their work. I think they'll also need to have a certain amount of protection from hacks willing to undercut them.
Most handbooks are boring and legalese because they can be evidence in court.
How is this different than any other technique to maximize engagement/readership, eg. inverted pyramid format for newspaper articles? It's probably designed to draw people in and sell copies. Is that also "gaming the algorithm"?
Of course it was eventually taken over by product managers, bureaucratic bloat, and WLB maxxers. I think my observation only applies to a company in its ascendance. As it matures, the 50th percentilers and the MBAs take over. And it slowly declines. Less slowly if it has achieved a monopoly (search, in the Google case).
In other words, if I were working on a new programming language (just as an example), and could go hire Anders Hejlsberg as a consultant, well, that -is- going to be a mega cheat code. The amount of experience he'd bring to bear to even a 30 minute call would be insane. He would save me months or even years in mistakes and bad directions, and lead me straight to the core of whatever I wanted to do.
That's the thing - he's not talking about hiring a generic "cake consultant". With that in mind, it'd be much easier to find those people - you'd know them by their achievements.
Proceeds to not describe the opposite, and instead projects the viewpoint of the generation that grew up believing that becoming social media icons was the equivalent to being Steve Jobs.
We just recognize the grifter attitudes and process from extensive exposure.
We watched Youtube together as a family at first and when the kids got older I helped them find creators and setup their own subscriptions. The worst thing a parent can do is sit them in front of Youtube Kids brainrot. They started with lots of education,science,maker/craft,animation and PG gamers like Hermitcraft.
I think it's always worth thinking about what you can leave slack / idle space in. For example, you might not keep multiple stations free, but you might invest in a larger oven than you need to make the cakes you currently make. Or you might invest in more bakery space than you need, including extra workspace than you can utilize at 100%. Not because you necessarily anticipate higher demand, but because you might get a customer that's asking for a cake bigger than your standard. Or because you might have a customer placing a large order and need some extra room to spread out more, or to have a temporary helper be able to do some small part of the job even if they can't use the space as a full station.
But also idleness might look like "you don't spend all of your time baking orders for customers". If you never build in slack for creating, experimenting and learning, you'll fall behind your competition, or stagnate if your design and art is a selling point.
Because it’s extraordinarily effective?
He made it to the top of YouTube with it. If it’s the exact same thing as other existing techniques how come others haven’t been able to match his success with those classic formulas?
His huge budgets and willingness to reinvest all the profits into future videos have allowed MrBeast to produce a lot of unique videos which are effectively unmatched by anyone else. Right now they're really the undisputed kings of the platform, by a massive margin.
Yes, it is exhausting to read through those comments, more exhausting to argue against them. Not sure if it is worth it anymore, this is probably not a tide that can be stopped. But HN is still one of the few sites that is not wholly dominated by last men, and you can find thoughtful comments that broaden your perspective occasionally. Enjoy it while it lasts!
Disagree. The outliers don’t determine the value of the platform.
The videos of people creating, fixing, coding, diagnosing, doing every day random things - those are a gift to humanity.
Those visual demonstrations transcend language. Because of this, YouTube is more important than Google or any written word website.
Knowledge share is finally global.
The Rolling Stone profile has a good breakdown of his content cerca 2022: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/mrbeas...
If you’ve only read my summary then we are discussing this with completely different mental models of what he actually does.
I don't think it's disputable that what Enron was doing, by the end, was fraud. 'The Smartest Guys in the Room' got a little too caught up in attacking mark-to-market, which itself isn't intrinsically fraudulent, but boy can it be misused for fraud, and the Enron guys absolutely and inarguably used M2M (among many other things) for fraud. Wilfully and knowingly.
Life is indeed shades of grey, but don't get so unmoored in your relativism that you end up giving cover to people doing genuinely bad things.
There are many more discussing all that has come out recently about that channel.
tldr it's not that deep bro, business people are shady and draw ire mostly thanks to decades of business people being shady and drawing ire.
It alleges that many of the “contests” are staged and artificially manipulated and potentially violate laws around such games. I think to many that might feel like fraud.
They do not describe the same process everyone else uses to make content. They are much more specific than that.
Think toxic game forums. They used to be nice and a good place, but now? It's a hot mess and everyone who wants proper discourse already self selected out.
There is better content in the world and those who have the taste to seek it out generally will.
Not a rhetorical question; confused.
Can you really not think of any powerful/wealthy/influential/successful/... person that you just have a simple fundamental value disagreement with, and would definitely not want to be in their shoes even given the opportunity?
Clear your cookies, cache, local storage, stay logged out, and see what happens. The baseline is junk.
So, I’ll give him credit for that.
My paranoid take is that it is a type of hypnotism or mind control yet to be deciphered.
In reality, it is just a cheap way of generating (remixing/stealing) content with TTS voice overs and algorithmic selections of video clips. I would bet there is software tailored for it, but I am not interested enough to find out.
I read the blog post and I found it interesting. It's something I will file under "interesting" and over time with many other things informs how I think about the topic of building successful businesses and teams. It's something I've been thinking and doing (more on the teams side, less on the business) for a while. It's not something that you just read a blog about and then go do what that blog post says. This is true of technical topics as well. If life was as easy as just do what this other (successful) guy/company does or thinks (in whatever discipline or on whatever topic) then we'd all be immensely successful at everything. It's true that success and failures should feed into building our intuition of what works and what doesn't but intuition is built over a lot of experiences.
That's not an endeavor I'd be interested in participating in, but I did find the PDF fascinating and read all of it.
A good bit of his guide is about 1. taking responsibility for delivering what you are expected to 2. keeping the big picture in mind
Plenty of folks could benefit from that advice and the examples he provides to make it more concrete.
In the disagreement hierarchy(https://paulgraham.com/disagree.html) this is level 4 or 5, but pretending to be level 6. Like using a bug to say that the software lacks basic value.
At least personally I appreciate both kinds of thoughtful comments, and it's what's keeping me coming back here. Equating valid criticism with "negativity" on the other hand honestly seems pretty toxic/cultish to me.
I'm not a fan of Mr. Beast but it's quite a phenomena and human nature being something universal I'm sure there are some interesting nuggets from how that business is run.
I also don't get or watch reality shows from more traditional media.
What's definitely a valid target of criticism are the methods, though.
I'm not saying I like Mr Beast or this document, but it seems extremely obvious to me that this document is the way it is very intentionally.
The specific sentence offers relatability and a (perceived) degree of honesty. Stating the obvious isn't always bad — it often builds empathy and connections.
In my opinion, he is not at all trying to shield himself from criticism, he is building a connection with the reader.
We are not machines.
I think that's very straightforwardly the point of contention here. Some people are doing that and are discussing the business aspects; others aren't.
I don't think any particular discussion is more appropriate than the other, as long as people are in agreement on which one they're having.
However, I would argue that on this particular forum, in 2024, there's a lot of people pretending they are making "highly rational" value assessments which are in fact emotional upvote blankets. It feels like a vibe shift over the last 10 years from a community of optimistic entrepreneurial types to a community of, as another commenter eloquently put it, Nietzschean "Last Men."
a) The youtube market is not like other markets, his strategy is successful because (among many things) the youtube algorithm promotes frequent posting. He knows youtube very well, but it's clear from his other business ventures that he's not good in other markets. I don't think you can translate ALL the stuff there into other markets.
b) There's a lot of unhealthy stuff mixed in with the parts that seem like they drive his success. If somebody does X, Y and Z and gets insane levels of success, they may not realize that it's X and Y driving the success, and Z is actively harmful. But I guess it depends on what you consider "harmful" - some might think "harmful" means "hurts the bottom line" and some might think "hurts those lowest on the rung". Either one of those might be true. It's like people who think being an asshole like early Steve Jobs is the way to be a successful leader, when he arguably achieved more lasting impact when he mellowed out.
With that context, I think some of the critiques you mention have substance.
"He's making low value content" -> I think this is true, because he's optimized for the market he's in. I think it's a legit critique that this strategies may not be sustainable or applicable to "high value content". He even expressly says this: "Not the highest quality videos.. It’s to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible."
"the culture of the company is horrible" -> I absolutely think this is worth talking about, and I find it hard to see building a long term company on his approach. The myth that you need to push people to breaking points to be successful is poison.
"he's a fraud/it's more luck than skill" -> Well anyone saying that is just wrong. He obviously is very good at what he does.
Personally, I don't think it's a good long term business strategy to depend so much on a single larger company, one who has a history of changing the algorithm without warning or explanation. But it's a good, but painful, short term strategy, and he will come out of it perfectly fine whenever he suddenly becomes irrelevant. But there are others who won't/haven't come out with much, and I think it's good to have a discussion if this is right or not.
But there are good things there, the critical components, the importance of communication. The direct feedback of "You are my bottleneck" is good, but it easily could turn into passive aggression and ways to pass the buck. I'm sure there's plenty of low quality comments here, but don't just write off all criticism as virtue signalling or whatever. There are def lessons in here, but that doesn't mean it's all above questioning.
Your description well fits someone who is not on HN (and is well known for being very anti-HN). <>>40826280 >
I'm not going to beg you to share it after all, but just letting you know: if you would, I'd read it.
The fact there is some useful educational content is a byproduct of the machine of lucrative trash of the capitalist hellhole spiral, and the written word will always prevail comparatively. You can always bet on text. https://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/193447.html
Also, as you likely know, YouTube is owned by Google so it’s very silly to say it’s “more important.”
Has a lot in common with Roger Corman's "How I made a hundred movies in Hollywood and never lost a dime."
[1] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YaG9xpu-WQKBPUi8yQ4HaDYQLUS...
Fix both of these, and HN would have far fewer issues related to what you are describing.
All other explanations of this phenomenon which don't talk about the above two are not even close to on point.
HNs userbase builds far too much for that. Nietzsche was so garbage, he was just buttmad that Philipp Mainlander and Schopenhauer were 1. much more correct and 2. more famous than he ever was in their own eras.
It's also telling that Nietzsche is the foundation behind all of the garbage from the french post-modern neomarxist/critical theorist/situational international folks. You are the thing you hate.
I would say since it's about reality it's less junk then something like Shakespeare which is completely made up.
You should expect reward from dedication because you’ll get it. Not from some god on high or some random person called Tyler Smith. It’s from yourself or the fruits of your labor.
I've noticed a similar general trend for some kinds of posts. (the more technical ones tend to escape this) The fix is that when you see posts with that kind of social signaling, downvote and flag them.
The downvote is because these posts are always extremely uninteresting, low-effort, and detrimental to HN as a whole.
The flag is because these posts almost always break the HN guidelines in multiple ways, e.g. "Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.", "Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle.", "Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread."
This is one of the few ways that we can continue to avoid HN from turning into Reddit - by self-moderating. Dang seems to take a light touch to moderation and does almost zero curation, so it's up to the users to help keep HN about intellectual curiosity and avoid degenerating into Reddit.
The points in the OP boil down to:
* Focus on your product
* Hire well
* Be extra diligent towards bottlenecks
* State your metrics clearly
* Communicate often and immediately
________
These are standard guidelines for running businesses. HN commenters are unimpressed because there are no novel generalizable takeaways from his document.
For a few years, Adam Sandler was producing low-brow schlock that made 100s of millions in the box office. It was effective. It's not clear if there was a takeaway
________
There is 1 takeaway from Mr. Beast that appears generalizable.
Sometimes, for a short duration, you hit gold. During that time, obsessively extract all value you can. Merch, videos, exploitation, what have you. For a solid minute, you're Midas. So touch as many things as you can. Be shameless beyond recognition.
Too often, businesses see their hockey-stick moment as a sign of long term sustainable growth. That's a lie (in expectation). A moment is all it is. Wring out your business for every dollar you can extract, liquidate as much as you can, and bail before you're past the crest of the wave.
I'm confident that Mr. Beast's Youtube stardom will die in a few years. But, he will leave behind a legacy of obsessive extraction that is unlikely to be matched for quite some time.
It’s always amazing to me how often the person 3 desks over has already solved the same problem, but is never asked how by the next person. Instead, too many people act like they’re the first person to ever attempt whatever they’re working on.
Props to this guy for producing popular content and piecing together some management concepts, but this is so far from anything corporate leaders “need” to read.
In the section quoted below for example, he starts off by writing about critiques, in which he appears to have immediately grasped for words that aren't suited for the purpose, such as how the nonsensical "personalized to" should have been "focused on". He add the completely unnecessary pseudointellectual "to one extent or another", to make it seem like he is intensely judging ideas. He then says the "social purpose" is "universal" which I'm not following the meaning of at all. I doubt many others are either, but it just seems like another pseudointellectual throwaway. He then follows that with "which is that I felt uncomfortable that reading this might mean I have to re-evaluate my worldview", which is perhaps the most atrociously nonsensical and poorly laid out sentence fragment I've read in a long time. In the part following that, he needed a period before "actually" for it to make sense as he likely intended.
Honestly, it seems like he's just trying to write words as they come to him as if in a heated and rash spoken conversation, in which he has a elevated personal impression of erudition, compared to the people he believes he communicating down to.
"The actual critiques are personalized to the content and, to one extent or another, valid, but the social purpose of the critiques is universal which is that I felt uncomfortable that reading this might mean I have to re-evaluate my worldview and I'm going to dive into the comment section and upvote all the people telling me actually, I don't have to do that."
But MrBeast does pay. He pays for it with every video, because YouTube keeps 45% of the ad revenue for it. If he receives ~$300,000 for a video, YouTube has kept another ~$300,000.
Does this guy know his business? Oh, hell, yes. He clearly knows his business cold. Success always has a significant chunk of luck, but skill is a part of luck, and he clearly demonstrates that skill.
However, just because someone really knows their business and does well at it does not mean we simply give them a complete pass. For example, payday lenders know their business very well yet we still consider them to be exploitative and parasitic.
This guy is super-specializing in explicitly targeting pretty much mostly teenaged males with purely dopamine hit content with very little benefit (if any and possibly a negative effect) to the audience. He is pushing the video equivalent of junk food to an audience with weak, underdeveloped impulse control.
This is going to get pushback, and it absolutely deserves that pushback.
> excuses for why it's not necessary in this instance to re-examine your priors.
Which priors should I reexamine? The fact that he is effectively targeting adolescent males? The fact that YouTube is all consumed with feeding the ad machine and should be forced out of Google? The fact that social media has turned out to be a pox upon our society?
No, it was because I had not read the news about MrBeast having a sexual predator on his team. My interpretation of the earlier comment here was that this should have been a flag that the heading “no doesn’t mean no” should have been called out.
Without that knowledge of the current predator scandal, I don’t think I was wrong to skip that section when writing up my summary. I read that section and it didn’t make my “highlights” list for when I wrote about the document.
I’m being defensive here because it sounds like you are calling me out for something, but I’m not sure what that something is.
One distressing trend I've noticed becoming ubiquitous on HN
is that any writing that is confronting to a consensus worldview
becomes flooded with highly upvoted comments that are, in essence,
excuses for why it's not necessary in this instance to re-examine
your priors.
I've seen something happening more and more on HN that bothers me.
When someone writes something that goes against what most people
think, the comments section gets filled with popular replies.
These replies are basically just reasons why you don't need to
think about changing your mind on this topic.
And there isn't anything wrong with profit maximisation; we use profits to make decisions about resource allocation. That matters a lot, small inefficiencies leading to waste magnified over the entire economy represent huge damage to the people scraping by on the margins.
So we don't want to break people, but adding one more person makes the company worse. So a very successful company is probably going to push people very hard, because otherwise communication costs eat it alive. I've been in way too many companies that got way worse over time, just because the headcount increases ruined productivity.
I would hope not, because that's not really a thing to be "considered", because it's not factual (as implied by the word "understanding"), but an opinion.
There's very little empirical evidence for the claim that "everything has been turned only into profit maximization". It's not something that's true or false - it's a worldview, an emotional outlook. One can imagine other worldviews like "the profit maximization is a direct result of the government not doing its job to break up monopolies" or "I disagree, very few of the companies I interact with are doing profit maximization in a way that significantly negatively impacts me". You can argue about which of those is "true" and find various factoids on the internet that "back them up", but ultimately they're just ways that you look at the world with little empirical basis.
As such, predicating all of your comments on them and pushing them at every turn is boring, and against the purpose of HN, which is intellectual curiosity. Reviewing the guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) should pretty quickly tell you why this content isn't appropriate for HN:
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
> Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
These "sour grapes" comments and cynicism-without-substance comments are very clearly not gratifying to one's intellectual curiosity, and almost always fall into the realm of generic tangents and internet tropes.
There's a place for activism, but it's not here.
By the end they were doing clear and obvious fraud, particularly in how they orchestrated the incoming funding for projects, and it had become clear that M2M was not working, but I don't think this was the only possible outcome.
To give an example with interpersonal relationships- never in my adult life have I encountered an adult who freely admits that jealousy is their motivation for attacking the reputation of a friend, but it happens all the time.
Read the book. I came in thinking "Enron bad" at the beginning, but left the opinion I stated above, that they did clearly commit fraud, but that it wasn't just a bunch of bad people deciding to do fraud one day, that it was a slow transformation from things that were obviously legal, to things that were obviously illegal, where it's actually surprisingly hard to draw a line separating the two.
Mark to market accounting for energy businesses doesn't work (in this way at least). We know that now because Enron tried it, legally, and it didn't work, somewhat spectacularly.
* He thinks most people dislike Mr. Beast, his company, and think he's popular only due to luck.
* He thinks this document makes good points, but that most people won't be able to see them due to what they believe about Mr. Beast prior to reading it.
Past film and tv folks I know have a hard time just diving in and doing it because they're so used to the processes they've had before. Not all are like this, and the ones that aren't, have a huge advantage over juniors with the open mind and experience to boot.
Even the digital side of shooting with a high end phone and editing well enough with tools still seems to not convince them.
On the other side, the OBS crowd, and youtubers are year by year improving their production skills and some of it's kind of starting to look pretty high quality.
Youtube will have no problem if it wants becoming the universal cable network with an obscure channel for pretty much everything that is very decent quality.
It's a lot of work to stay open minded, flexible, free, and not know better.
Still, investing in their development can yield the kinds of people that an organization may be after.
basically what I am trying to say is you are not the median Youtube viewer
For instance, much of the initial research into the harms of smoking was done in Germany in Nazi times. While the results were largely correct (and later confirmed elsewhere), it was much easier for tobacco proponents to contest or reject them on the grounds of the Nazi Germany origins.
[1]: https://davidsamson.substack.com/p/tribaltheory-002-tribalis...
It's a common phrase in the ratsphere (and its descendants).
Changing your mind is one outcome, but the implication is that it requires a complete reexamining of your worldview, as changing the internalized probabilities can have many effects on perceived likely outcomes.
- don’t sneer at the rest of the community
- don’t comment about the upvoting of comments
- don’t say hacker news is turning into Reddit (not explicitly the case here, but similar in spirit)
Yeah, some responses will be less thoughtful than others, but that’s what voting is for.
Plenty of very successful people that I know personally think that attention-hacking stuff like Mr Beast videos, YouTube/Instagram/TikTok shorts etc are bad news.
Hell, I wouldn't consider myself Steve Jobs level, but I think I've done alright, and I feel that way, so, er, where does that leave me? Do I need 700 million or whatever for it to not be sour grapes? There are plenty of extremely successful (whether financial or otherwise) individuals that I do respect.
"was unfortunately complicated by the CrowdStrike incident, extreme weather and other unexpected logistical and communications issues"
"extreme weather"
"communications issues"
Are you doing this on purpose? I'm not even a fan of the guy but this type of out-of-context taking just hurts discourse. It's the type of thing I came to HN to avoid.
>> Do not leave consteatants waiting in the sun (ideally waiting in general) for more than 3 hours. Squid game it cost us $500,000 and boys vs girls it got a lot of people out. Ask James to know more
Can someone explain this to me? I don't quite get what the original quote means.
The show is fantastic but as far as I'm aware they didn't pull great view numbers, which can probably be attributed to some less than stellar advertising.
That doesn't mean the criticism is false. But it's always weird to me when I see it put forward as a new thing.
Are Marvel films shady for being popular? Is HN shady for adding features which increase engagement?
It's a drama written by YouTube influencers. It thrives on being "real" while having to do with reality as much as "reality tv". Which is to say, none at all.
You don't necessarily need to hire someone like Anders to pick their brain.
A lot of people who are not huge in the zeitgeist (and also are not assholes) are surprisingly reachable.
Funnily enough, I've chatted with Anders about programming language design -- I got the impression he thought my ideas were terrible.
For a while, you could just email Noam Chomsky and he would respond.
I worry that C player status is something fundamentally broken about a person. Maybe it’s as simple as their intellectual capacity?
I don't know what "cost us $500,000" refers to though.
Gonna keep that one handy.
I believe Job's was providing this perspective more in the late 2000's after he had been through the whole Apple exile/Next thing.
There is a limited amount of resources (time, people and money). If you have a list of 100 things to fix, you better figure out which of those 100 are going to drive the biggest improvement.
I see teams all the time focused on fixing a problem without stopping for a minute to ask "will fixing this actually make a difference?".
Considering we used a monumental wealth of nazi research, and the existence of operation paper clip. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190723-the-ethics-of-us...
Even though you’re correct that Nazi rhetoric impacted creating permissive tobacco policies. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2736555/
To clarify, I think it’s because it’s an extreme example, that while technically perhaps accurate, misses that it’s a hard one for a reader to relate to effectively and misses a subtext of: shouldn’t any research from that source (of which what are the ethics of using it as well?) especially in a lens of 1940/1950, be subjected to extreme skepticism? Where additional replication may not be practical or possible.
That said, it might work out, who knows? But at some point it looks like gambling with your time and energy trying to seek fulfillment. Again, they are free to do this, just try not to harm others in the process.
Then those aren't people Jimmy wants to hire for his company. There are hundreds of millions of teenagers on this planet that want to stake everything they own to make a YouTube channel and reap the rewards - ownership of their work, being their own boss, potentially lucrative amounts of money, microcelebrity if not greater levels of fame, etc. Some will do it, and some won't. Jimmy is very clearly talking to those people.
I know because I was one of them, making my first few hundred dollars ever from adsense at the age of 14 (till I was demonetized a year later and my channel got taken down for copyright, but hey, you learn). I've since grown a bit a taken that energy and it's helped guide me as I learn to make my own startup right now - it's the same adrenaline rush and pursuit of the American dream.
This guy has a genuine love of torturing people
>It’s very important as a company we maintain proper communication lines. ... If you skip and just go below you prizemust then call and let the people in charge know. Let’s say you’re a production coordinator and you call a writer and tell him you need some bits about a sandwich being cooked with lava, seems harmless... and then tyler askes her why she is making lava and she has no idea and everyone is confused. This is what happens when you don’t follow proper communication lines.
Skipping over all the typos, it's just such a great visual of the communication breakdowns that can happen when a lot of things are going on.
Also this section on tracking contractors:
> [Y]ou can’t just dump and forget your projects... Ask him to send videos everyday to spot problems early, hell maybe talk to him twice a day. I don’t care just don’t leave room for error. No excuses, stop leaving room for error. Check in daily, receive videos, and know weeks in advance if you’re fucked. Not days.
This is more extreme than I encounter in my day to day, very on brand to MrBeast, but it's interesting to see this constant accountability and ownership are so critical in their production. I see similar behavior in some of the more effective people I've worked with.
Surprised that he says he studied youtube virality. It seemed that he got his ideas from 80s prank TV but over time his titles became increasingly audacious.
Also surprised that his videos are being watched to the end. The clickbait generates curiosity for watching , but his vids are so predictable it s totally boring
Everybody's riding the "MrBeast" train because he s so successful , even though they truly don't like him. 3 years down the line he will be in court defending his abuses
whether that is convenient altruism masquerading as a disdain for greed or sheer jealousy at their own lack of agency or fortuna or virtu is for their own ego to hopefully one day confront.
By definition yes, because a B player by definition can be turned into an A player. But by that token, anyone that can be turned into a B player, is by definition a B player already. Hence, a C player, who is by definition not a B player, cannot be turned into a B player.
>I worry that C player status is something fundamentally broken about a person. Maybe it’s as simple as their intellectual capacity?
It would be motivation. Intellectual capacity can in principle be fixed, but motivation cannot because you would need to motivate them to fix it.
completely incorrectlyFor juniors: any time you send something important to your manager, confirm they read the document. Don't ask "did you read it?" Don't rely on reactions in chat. Ask a specific question that would require them to read the contents of the document. For example, if you're sending over a quote from a vendor, and you'd already sent another quote before, you could ask "how does this quote compare to the previous one? [link to previous one]" Always get confirmation at least 24-48 hours in advance of the point-of-no-return (e.g. launch, meeting, changing dates, company-wide emails), very preferably in writing.
And for _very_ important meetings, ensure all parties have either acknowledged understanding of the required information, or schedule pre-meeting briefings with individuals. There's nothing quite like getting thrown under the bus because someone showed up and couldn't figure out the subtleties & context on the fly. Unfortunately you can't just say "it's a 12 page document for a reason." when your manager is confused in front of their manager.
Under a more rational angle, any promising results obtained by an enemy should be double- and triple-reproduced, because an enemy may be planting disinformation into it. But this is a bit more serious than somebody you don't like making a comment you would rather have made yourself, and you already agree with the point because you would make it yourself and are now in a bind. That's the kind of uncomfortable situation I initially referred to.
Before today, it was never differentiated. Since the drama started, I've seen more news and people (like yourself) clarify that you mean the company vs the person, and I'm not sure its warranted.
While everything was going good, MrBeast the person took all credit for MrBeast the company. Now, it seems like everyone is on tip-toes to clarify they are trash-talking MrBeast the company, not MrBeast the person.
It just seems a bit weird to me.
- they believe velocity is simply additive (A player + B player > A player)
- they look too much into credentials (big name school / employer) and do not adequately vet ability
- they start with the attitude “let’s give this person a chance and see if they work out” and become too reluctant to fire when they turn out mediocre.
Teams should be more comfortable staying small longer in my opinion.
HN also has a lot of the "other" type (those who are rational but honest and objective), and the main distinction should be which of those dominate. And I'd argue instead that on HN, that group dominates with their comments and upvotes/downvotes.
Eg. I consider myself the "engineer" or "hacker" type of person: someone who critically looks at most things, and is quick to come up with ideas for improvement ("what could be better?", which is really, to criticize), and need to remember to acknowledge the positives and praise the good. I drew more motivation from being involved with free and open source software or academia than from ever wanting to be "the next Steve Jobs". I totally don't see HN as the echo chamber, but quite the opposite.
Just wanted to share some fond memories.
If you think that this is an entirely artificial example, consider the fact that the same man designed the V-2 rockets which were hitting London during WWII, and the Saturn-5 rockets which brought astronauts to Moon: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun
It's really not that hard. If they sincerely thought they were doing something legal they would have sat back and waited to be vindicated, not spun up the The Power-Shredder 2400™ in a panic and started feeding it what, for the sake of argument, a court of law might want to call "evidence".
That's a line, crossed pretty definitively.
Cockroaches.
It’s entirely possible the success has nothing to do with the business principles and 100% the ethics. Same the other way around, or anywhere in between.
This is ridiculous analysing his performance while ignoring his ethics especially when it's part of his income if not a fundamental strategy
content for dumb kids
I think the idea being debated here is that it’s impossible to know whether the business practices would work without the lack of ethics. It might not be a good case study or a direction you want people going in as it might put them in some of the ethically compromising positions, or even worse require people to put themselves in those positions to work
https://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/through-the-lens...
And also Vrba–Wetzler report
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vrba–Wetzler_report
I don't want someone to think that i'm blaming someone for reading stuff. I just think and see that sometimes for people it is very easy to forget or miss bad things (harm to society) when their salary (or income) depends on ignoring this.
1. Taking direct ownership
2. Doing things that are effective, even though they're socially uncomfortable
3. Working towards the goal, to the detriment of other things which sound good but are not the goal
4. The way they fight to keep retention to incremental checkpoints. I don't know if this has any applications for Engineering, but certainly for marketing and communication it does.
5. The claimed method of constantly evaluating his employees _really_ appeals to me
So I believe your point leads to the conclusion that critiques at this time of the ruling authorities within this company might lead to a reorganization of control, such as might best position any further advancements to benefit a wider population in more pro social ways.
(von Braun being a clear “A-Player”, not a CEO, given the terminology at hand)
One day he asked me about programming and this dude just couldn’t sit still without needing a distraction.
He consumed all these meme videos and used to bug me by sending me brain rot.
Unfortunately this is the majority of people. I used to be poor so I lived like this in a house where 4-5 people shared the space.
They just cannot think because they gave up and it’s impossible to do anything for them.
On one hand I’m glad gig economy exists so it can keep people like him busy. I believe people like him would be dangerous if not provided a distraction.
I don’t understand how people don’t have curiousity to learn more. Instead they will waste time since kids just throwing all potential to waste playing games like COD or watching YT all day. It’s not even sad anymore just pathetic.
In your particular example, lawmakers don't wake up one day and decide to write anti-trust legislation. They do it in response to sustained pressure from constituents who must first understand what's going wrong and propose (hopefully somewhat effective) ways to fix it. So understanding what's going on in your own community and how a business specifically is taking advantage is a good thing to do if you have the time and inclination.
Because of the latter, businesses leaders can also quite often talk about the former without even noticing that normal people regard "exploiting people" as a bad thing.
Sometimes it's hard to even agree what counts as exploitation of a person: The profit margin of every successful employer I've ever had is, in some sense, them exploiting me — but I've also worked in places where that's negative, loss-making, and the investors paid for my time with the profits made from others, which feels to me like the successes I've been involved with paying for the failures, not exploitation.
yet, sitting in ketchup is brainrot content - 0 value
Also he clearly states it shouldn’t be illegal. You should read posts more carefully before resorting to ad hominem attacks
You put humans in extreme situations and you see how they react and you see what they do. It is an examination of psychology 100%. That's why people were interested in the original show because how humans behave in extreme situations is what a lot of people are interested in.
>It's a drama written by YouTube influencers. It thrives on being "real" while having to do with reality as much as "reality tv". Which is to say, none at all.
Possible. But then again you have no evidence to back that up that it's entirely fake. The leaked document doesn't mention anything about faking anything. You made this statement up out of thin air without presenting evidence.
What's your evidence that Mr. Beasts videos don't have any psychology and are all fake?
But I would be comfortable pushing back on the idea that we should structure and operate our medical clinics like theirs because they made scientific breakthroughs.
Is anyone saying that Mr Beast is good and shouldn't be criticised? I can't see them.
You don’t think this is optimized for for engagement? Don’t let the beige design fool you.
How do you know they are 'good habits'. I have seen countless years of bad practices lauded internally as amazing/the etalon weight when it comes to code quality. In reality most of them were textbook examples of what should not be done. When you get folks without any previous experience, there's no one to question the status or the authority. If they learn/wisen up, they are likely to leave.
If you're a software shop, hiring an army of consultants to build out core parts of your solution who will walk away when they're finished, you're doing it wrong. Success doesn't come from assembling piles of slop, it comes from putting together a team that will stick together to build value over the long term.
If you're an individual who wants to improve X part of themselves (fitness, musical ability, scholarship, whatever) then hiring a "consultant" (a trainer, a coach, a tutor, a therapist) is not only massively beneficial but almost an essential part of the process. You can easily measure the value you're getting from the consultant against the progress you're making.
If you're assembling highly complicated custom work on strict deadlines, hiring experts in that specific area of customization is pretty critical to consistently making those deadlines.
> How do you find them?
Connections, networking, and reputation, usually. MrBeast is lucky in that YouTube presents a good search platform; trying to find people who had made massive cakes before was probably just 5 minutes of searching and sorting by views.
The Enron scandal took place over nearly a 10 year period. The company was weird but likely not illegal for probably half that, most of even senior leadership appeared to be in the dark about the actual fraud (willingly or otherwise) until probably a few years left. They only started shredding evidence with weeks left. This is a 20k person company, no matter how you slice it that many people aren't committing a large conspiracy together and to suggest otherwise is ludicrous.
Mr Beast’s “youtube success hacking”, or whatever you want to call it, excels in the most obvious of ways: use hyperbole all of the time and use extreme and borderline misanthropic interpersonal interaction to achieve goals.
I don’t think either of these activities would surprise anyone at achieving success in _some_ form, despite how manipulative and sociopathic they are. What exactly is to be learned here? Where is the deep understanding?
People click on things that are hyperbolic. When people are threatened with losing their jobs unless they perform at an extremely high level, they will work to the best of their ability to achieve that level, at the expense of practically everything else they value in their lives. None of this is new or novel.
Most people avoid employing these structures because they’re viciously misanthropic and cynical. Some, of course, do, but I don’t see us using that information to ignore them or prevent them from existing. I just see them lauded for “thinking outside the box” on Hacker News.
Apart from that, what surprised me was that it had vibes of 1950s: watercolor still images, and the music score not with analog synths (that we'd expect from the '80-s), but a (small) orchestra with TRUMPETS leading. (This was the biggest '50s factor for me.)
Instead look at reddit is desperately trying (inline ads, chat, avatars, forcing app use)
This statement is misleading because the broad appeal of both Shakespeare and Mozart today is the culmination of centuries of attempts to understand (and misunderstand) them. Calculus can be taught to high schoolers nowadays, but how many scientists in Newton's days could understand the Principia in its entirety?
Not to mention that Shakespeare and Mozart were both able to produce works of the highest sophistication that leaves most of their contemporaries (and many today) baffled. Harold Bloom wrote that the sophisticated word play in Love's Labour's Lost was not surpassed until Joyce, and Mozart's contemporaries complained endlessly about the complex textures in his opera finales. When Mozart wrote piano trios for the public, his publisher cancelled the series after two pieces because they were judged far too difficult for the masses, and when Mozart intended to write some easy piano sonatas at the end of his life, the first (the only one he completed) turned out to be the most difficult he ever wrote.
Invoking the popularity of Shakespeare or Mozart as analogues to Mr Beast reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the longevity of both Shakespeare or Mozart, and leaves unmentioned the extensive body of difficult works on which their reputation rests today.
That's not psychology. That's torture for dubious gains. By that stretch of imagination, you can construe any gulag or concentration camp as an examination of psychology.
Psychology would require a double-blind experiment, some kind of control group, etc.
> Possible. But then again you have no evidence to back that up that it's entirely fake.
https://www.uniladtech.com/social-media/youtube/mrbeast-resp...
He already faked videos before.
Most of how reality TV works is by live editing to create narratives and guiding players along what the audience wants to see. It's lies by omission and exaggeration.
> The leaked document doesn't mention anything about faking anything.
Well, of course the official manual isn't going to spell it out, that's stuff that's admissible in court. But learn to read between the lines.
No CEO is going to tell his employees, lie, cheat and steal to get our taxes to appear as low as possible, and our revenue as high as possible. They will say: "Be a go getter. Get those KPIs in the green. Only you can make a difference! Make me proud! Etc."
That said, the leaked production document is alarming even by these standards. "NO DOES NOT MEAN NO" stands head and shoulders above the rest in its implication, even if it didn't sound like a rapist's mantra.
You don't have to imagine very hard.
By de facto, you never ignore ethics. You may disregard them, but they're never ignored.
This is a good question. I would say that I don’t know how to quantify “societal progress” aside from arbitrary wishes that I can imagine, so I guess since we still have war, hunger, illness, poverty, crime and indignity in our society… all of it? All societal progress has possibly been killed by mrbeats.
I haven’t had a lot of time to reflect on this. What in particular do you envision society could have accomplished without this man on youtube?
Sure I get it, probably there are lessons in there ethically good actors could look at and use — but if you find yourself casting away the ethical doubts too easily, you might be in a dangerous spot to begin acting unethical yourself. It is totally possible to learn about the whole system with a morbid fascination while being constantly aware of the ethical implications without casting them aside.
The real question for such an ethics-free look at a business is whether the unethical bits of a business can be really disentangled from the interesting bits in a meaningful way. That is very often not the case.
(Regarding tobacco, see a different thread: >>41552737 )
None of those are easy to achieve.
Sure, it's maybe not great to be impressed by the logistics of a militarized drug cartel, but from a business and systems view it's quite interesting. /sarcasm
This is literally cocaine logic, i.e. because I feel good when taking cocaine, it's good for me. Ergo, cocaine is good.
is it the same "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" shtick the american dream brainwashed americans with?
if you have that much drive and want to invest so heavily in work - do yourself a favour and do it as a leader where you call the shots and have the equity instead of as a follower.
YouTube content, thanks to its short-lived nature, has become essentially useless as a shared 'cultural context' unless one is plugged in 24/7.
It just seems to me like following a rich person around hoping some coins will fall out of their pocket. It's a parasitic ecosystem that encourages content to focus more and more on "what works" in the self-perpetuating context of that ecosystem, and less and less on making contact with any kind of external reality.
if an actual one, to me it is another interesting perspective inside the minds of a privately-owned, internet-based party that hold a significant mind-share in its domain.
What does this mean? You introduced the idea of government intervention unprompted because you wanted to be misunderstood by me?
Generally speaking if I do not want to introduce a topic to a conversation I just don’t do that. The laying of rhetorical traps is too complex for me when conveying something simple like “I don’t like this guy on youtube”
if it comes at the price of having it subsidised by the likes of mrbeast, i'm all for it. same trade-off as getting ads on instagram to enjoy it as a free service.
These people are the best positioned to figure this out. They've been experimenting with youtube changes for years and they already know how to experiment out the particularities.
Name any ethical company and I'm sure there will be questionable actions they did in past with "due to the market conditions" excuse.
No. Examining all human behavior under all circumstances is psychology. EVEN torture.
Even so. You call it torture and that's way over the top and offensive because what's happening here is NOT torture. These people are there voluntarily and are experiencing NOTHING even close to torture. I have family members who were in concentration camps so I know this.
>He already faked videos before.
Should've presented this first. I find it quite likely he faked some videos and others aren't fake.
>Well, of course the official manual isn't going to spell it out, that's stuff that's admissible in court. But learn to read between the lines.
I mentioned the manual because you didn't bring ANY evidence to the table. The only other official document on the table was the original article and I said IT had no evidence. There is no reading between the lines. Present evidence.
Your link here: https://www.uniladtech.com/social-media/youtube/mrbeast-resp... is good. But again it doesn't mean his whole operation is fake. AND this link is a mild and weak accusation at best that the abandoned city is near a popular beach or can't be reached by car. I happened to watch this video and he never mentioned it was completely remote like that. Those accusations are like saying yosemite isn't the wilderness because buses and shuttles drive around inside of the park.
>rapist's mantra.
Rapist? You're over the top describing things like this. Rape is a crime. What Mr. Beast does as bad as you think it is, is nowhere even close to rape.
HN actually discourages high engagement by having the front page items change fairly slowly (rather than algorithmically customizing them to each user), not making scrolling beyond that (i.e. pagination and the "latest" feed) any less awkward to navigate than it has been forever and actively preventing you from commenting too much within a given timeframe (which it doesn't actively disclose when you hit the limit). That's probably a bad example for something being "shady".
Personally, I think human behaviour is massively influenced by culture and that we have an individual moral responsibility to take actions that work in favour of having a healthy culture. And I see that individual moral responsibility as resting particularly on those who profit from culturally influential activities (and if Mr. Beast isn't "culturally influential", please can we retire the term "influencer"). I see arguments often made that amount to justifying amoral, or even actively immoral, behaviours by the fact that money can be made from them, with an implicit assumption that humans have no free will when it comes to money, that an action that makes money has to be carried out and that this somehow morally absolves the one who does it. I see that as a corrosive meme and evidence of a deeply unhealthy culture, not as a conclusion that follows from adopting capitalism as the primary organising principle in a society.
Not to hate on him, but just saying that's in sharp contrast with what MrBeast and LTT are trying to achieve.
Imagine instead that narrow, shallow, obsessed people (NSOBs) built a superior Banality Machine for absorbing the time and attention of suckers. The more suckers who watch, the more revenue earned by NSOB Inc.
> Should we even consider adopting it, given its clearly ethically unacceptable origins?
I regret that we have done so. At global scale.
You make a good point though! There are definitely a non-zero amount of productive hours resulting from his videos, just as there are a non-zero amount replaced with his videos. It would be fascinating if there was a way to quantify this, but it’ll likely forever be a philosophical argument
Psychology is a science. Or at least tries to be. What you describe is sadism.
> Should've presented this first.
You should have investigated Mr. Beast a bit better before coming into this discussion.
> There is no reading between the lines. Present evidence.
Have you ever worked in a corporate environment? Honest question. Because I did, and such behavior is standard practice. Never write anything that's incriminating, only discuss in private.
Hell, just read about Google and how engineers were told to not use the M(arket) -word in any written communication.
https://themarkup.org/google-the-giant/2020/08/07/google-doc...
> Rapist? Whatever this guy is, he's not a rapist. Your language is way over the top.
Step 1. Please read what I said. Step 2. Don't add words to my sentences.
I said SOUNDS LIKE a rapist's mantra. "No means no" is the female anti-rape slogan. What do you get when you negate an anti-rape mantra? A rapist's mantra.
-----
That aside, the 'No doesn't mean No' part sounds absolutely Machiavellian for a guidebook for new employees.
Sometimes i feel like we shit on youtube creators because it seems like what they do is silly or frivolous. But is that last software feature you worked on that nobody is ever going to use but is needed to check a box so marketing can say we meet some standard so that we can sell the product to some big corp decision maker who is never going to actually use the software, really any better?
Jobs a job. Ultimately people are doing it to pay the bills, not for the sake of art.
I just can't speak to Jimmy Donaldson himself. Not even sure how much he's involved in the day to day at the company (outside of being the public face).
Like a dude who puts in an hour of work to nail the "just rolled out of bed" look. Whether its a good or bad idea is debatable, but either way its not due to lack of effort.
Some legal entities are acting all the time in a way we would lock them up in psych ward if they were a natural person. That might be a good way to "succeed" but that's probably something the society shouldn't promote/foster.
In the real world it's not only revenue and profits. That's for sure taking most of the space but people behind the entities are caring about other stuff and takes non-profit-optimal decisions all the time.
The allegiations seems to have been:
- His shows are scripted to varying degrees - I think this should be obvious to anyone old enough to not think santa's real.
- Some of his friends/production staff did some bad stuff (I won't elaborate). These people are not MrBeast, but sovereign individuals. Production staff in the movie industry rotates at a weekly rate.
- His productions are a shitshow, with tons of stress overtime, last minute heroic saves etc. - If you've read/watched anything Adam Savage has written, you'll realise unfortunately the entire film industry is like this, with everything being on a tight timeline. Practical sets often can be set up once and get destroyed during filming. If somebody messes up, it's often weeks of work and millions of dollars down the drain.
Exceptional, outsized, market-beating results often only happen once you crack the one-in-a-thousand levels of effort, talent, etc.
The combination of two things both at 95th percentile is one way you can get there, but - obviously - staying at that level at multiple, mutually-reinforcing fronts simultaneously is harder than staying there for just one skill.
He is trully obsessive about getting the most views, almost soullessly designing the perfect viral content, caring about every second. He literally starts with the thumbnail and title and only then works out the rest of the video!
I also like this 2 years old video of visiting his studio. This guy literally sleeps in his giant studio, everything is super optimized.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUzpK0tGFcE
Of course the end result is entirely pointless. But still. I respect the grind.
(I also love when he "builds 1000 houses in Africa" or whatever, and he usually never even mentions the country or the place name. It's not that important. But at least he does some good, I guess.)
He did blame CrowdStrike, right at the top of the list of blame. He did not take any responsibility for what he and his org did.
Because it is. My brother works in industrial manufacturing machinery supplies. I can assure you the overwhelming majority of manufacturing machines on the planet are not only run constantly but as near to 99.999% as possible. So much that they are even loath to turn them off for critical maintenance rather preferring to let the machine break down so they don't get blamed for being the person to "ruin productivity"
This book sounds like one of those flights of fancy armchair generals are so found of going on.
Perhaps it works in small boutique shops making specialized orders but that is a slim minority of the overall manufacturing base. I could see why the advice would appeal to HN readers.
It's absurd to attempt to equate two actions completely out of their context to claim that "everyone is unethical sometimes ".
Ethics affect everything we do. If you are doing something deeply unethical, you have way more difficult time finding good employees, for example. Because people don't want to work for scumbags. And the people you find, are likely also unethical and care only about money, how do you think that is going to play out in the long run?
Business and ethics are inseparable. You have to understand ethics to be able to make money - not meaning that you need to be ethical.
When a big chunk of your business is about filming ludicrous stunts that nobody else on YouTube has been able to film it’s understandable that this idea would end up in your employee handbook.
Having a small backlog of video files in the file system shows how great file systems are compared to a subscription feed on a web site: You can pick and choose your next video, you can sort by different criteria, you can tag then and/or put them into folders and you can do that all one the fly.
"A players" know their worth and go somewhere that either has prestige, high pay or work life balance and respect. Like all such places in my experience Mrbeast does not appear to provide those things to all but his inner circle. Which by the way an "Inner circle" is a hallmark of places that like to make noise about A/B/C dynamics.
It doesn't make it net-bad. It makes it an ad-supported educational resource. Is that surprising, given that it's owned by an ad company?
Link: https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/apps/valve/Valve_NewEmplo...
I mean personally I mostly enjoyed Marvel until they started multiverse crap. And they made way too many TV shows that were all terrible. So I stopped watching.
Seems pretty low on the sketch scale to me.
- The obvious take is, the evil deed's already been done, the knowledge it produced can save lives and can't realistically be re-gathered any other way, so why not use it?
- The counter to that is, using it legitimizes and encourages similar acts in the future.
(Personally, I can see the encouragement angle; disagree with legitimization.)
- There's often a side thread going on about how the atrocities and those who committed them were not Up To Scientific Standards, therefore all their data is invalid, so there's no reason to use it anyway.
(Personally, I think this is a lame cop-out, used when one feels the ethical argument is too weak to stand on its own.)
It should be "always retain A-players". You can hire as many ABC's as you like - some of those C's will become B's and A's, and some of the B's will become A's, and the rest .. you let go with severance.
Thats the free market, baby. Live with it, or perish.
You have the façade presented to the public, then the operations of the businesses he runs, then the culture built within them. If you ignore the ethics then you won't see that a significant part of his success is in his PR muscle, and how (young) people then expect that follows through to working for him or going on his show.
I don't doubt that this isn't unlike the dream of going to work in the games industry as a kid, getting to make the very kind of game you loved to play, only to realise that what's on the inside is actually pretty ugly, and perhaps your fanaticism has been exploited.
IMO there's a nice parallel between useless evidence from bad experiments, and useless business practices from unethical companies. If you want to take the lessons but leave the bad stuff, often you'll find there's nothing left.
It's a science and observing human behavior is within the lines of that science. It's not formal application but it's observing human behavior nonetheless.
>You should have investigated Mr. Beast a bit better before coming into this discussion.
I did, found no evidence, and yours is flimsy.
>Have you ever worked in a corporate environment? Honest question. Because I did, and such behavior is standard practice. Never write anything that's incriminating, only discuss in private.
I don't care, without evidence everything is just made up circumstance. The possibility is there but your accusations are more than reading between the lines. The concentration camp thing and rapist comparison are evidence of this.
>I said SOUNDS LIKE a rapist's mantra.
Sounds like your a child molester and pedophile. See what I did there? I only said you "sound" like that. What I said was an example but if it was a real comparison it's completely over the top and uncalled for.
Your comparison was completely uncalled for, "No doesn't mean No" doesn't need to be placed in the context of rape, of course he's saying that in the context of an aggressive hustle culture.
>That aside, the 'No doesn't mean No' part sounds absolutely Machiavellian for a guidebook for new employees.
He's promoting a hustle culture. I'm not too into that myself. But "Machiavellian" is, again, too over the top.
If you replace "wheel" with "jerrycan", then that's exactly what happened.
Quoting from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerrycan :
> Such was the appreciation of the cans in the war effort that President Franklin Roosevelt noted, "Without these cans it would have been impossible for our armies to cut their way across France at a lightning pace which exceeded the German Blitzkrieg of 1940."
Looking at this phrase in isolation is such a fun. There are whole industries which work exactly like this (food, news, games, politics). These particular people aren't the cause, they are one of many many symptoms of the causes.
Causes are in rules, norms and incentives of the social and economical systems. We can't solve the problem at the leve at which it was created. These videomakers aren't even close to that level.
> but is it too much for me to expect at least some cultural pushback here?
And they are getting it. Which is not enough for a change, as "benefits" they are getting are way greater. Main driving forces behind the phenomena is rooted somwhere else, not in space of scope this type of conversations (moral, value, human-centric or achievement-centric aspects).
No, that's really shallow. "Humanity" is a perennial struggle. If I'd be looking for a word for the lowest common denominator it would be "beastliness", to stay on topic of the thread.
That criticism reads to me as a general hatred of what beastliness actually is.
I see a lone tree planter saving the Sahara from desertification and not making a lot of money or being very "efficient on Youtube" as MUCH more successful than MrBeast for my values...
So indeed it seems that you were unconsciously attracted by "efficiency" as "success", which is a common trait of people in tech
And this should be REALLY questioned, because our planet is going to the shitters (environment, climate) BECAUSE of extreme efficiency (to suck resources out and waste it)
That's why we expect from people that they take such entreprise as that of MrBeast with a grain of salt and more judgment
Basically his document is: "how to be even more efficient at inducing addiction-like behaviors in teens so that Youtube can sell them more ads for products they don't need (wasting the planet) and that I can get a slight share of this which is going to make me multi-millionaire (although I don't really need the money)"
is that REALLY the behavior which merits to be called "success"? Is that the kind of behavior we want our kids (or ourselves) to emulate?
That's not my department, " says Wernher von Braun.
And though the advice isn't particularly novel, it was worth reading since a surprisingly large amount of people don't do these simple things.
Example, I work for an energy company. Their objective is to earn money. They earn money by selling gas and electricity to their customers. Their revenue increases if they have more customers, using more electricity/gas, and if the price goes up. If they were honest, they would be pushing their customers to use more energy; "Hot in summer? Get an AC! Cold in winter? Don't wear a sweater, crank up the thermostat! Have you considered a sauna and jaccuzi? Isn't a long hot bath nice?" that kind of thing.
But all energy companies' marketing talk (both internal and external) is about reducing energy usage, their green energy efforts, tips to customers to reduce power use, apps and websites so they can monitor it, and currently, dynamic contracts so people can optimize their usage to when the price is lowest.
It's just so cynical.
Watching my nephews grow up, I'm sort of gobsmacked about what my sisters are allowing them to watch. It's quite literally brainrot, I genuinely think what they watch is actively detrimental to their mental health and intelligence, especially since they're all below 10. It's just constant stimulation every single millisecond with no room to breathe, filled with random sound effects and noises constantly, while the "plot" is always some nonsensical crap.
The minecraft ones are the absolute worst for this, and to me the saddest thing is they'd rather watch some brainrotting machinima-style thing rather than play the damn game themselves.
As a side note, reading this comment back I'd like to formally apologize to my parents, because it seems I've turned into them and saying the exact same things they said about my hobbies :)
Inertia. It's very difficult to outrun someone who has a head start.
Being efficient at destroying the planet is NOT success
If anything we need to go slower and gentler (environmentally, socially, economically), not "faster"
Just say he's "efficient" at what he does (descriptive) but not "successful" (value judgment)
that's clearly because people in tech generally value efficiency
but we have to take a step back collectively and understand that "being efficient at producing addictive video for teens to sell ads for shit they don't need" is BAD, not a "success"
That's not science. Science requires, hypothesis and testing, it also requires isolating confounding factors. Reality TVs and Mr. Beast videos aren't that.
> I did, found no evidence, and yours is flimsy.
Is it? Luckily, there is more, now go and look better.
> Sounds like your a child molester and pedophile. See what I did there?
Do you mean you're putting words in my mouth? I'm used to it.
> Your comparison was completely uncalled for, "No doesn't mean No" doesn't need to be placed in the context of rape, of course he's saying that in the context of an aggressive hustle culture.
Seeing the culture/people he surrounded himself with, I'm not sure if that's uncalled-for. But I'm awaiting further proof to make a definite statement.
> He's promoting a hustle culture. I'm not too into that myself. But "Machiavellian" is, again, too over the top.
'Ends justify the means' is literally Machiavellian. That guidebook is full of it. Call it hustle, call it A-players, it's the same thing.
---
To sum up, you don't know what science is, you don't seem to be able to read between the lines, came into this uninformed and have a nasty tendency to misread and put words I didn't write/commission into my mouth. I'm done here. This is debate with someone who's arguing in bad faith.
I think it’s due to the sheer amount of candidates, and the total power some superiors have over you.
It’s a sink or swim strategy, but you’re also swimming with sharks.
Being efficient at destroying the planet is to successfully destroy the planet.
I think the original point was precisely to separate the concepts that make something successful - to be successful at what you do - from a judgement on the outcomes - the thing that you are doing.
Underpaid, overworked, expectations of “total dedication”, for the off-chance that you can rise to the top or branching out.
Don't dismiss the entire community because of the loud people and their upvoters though. There are other people here, and they don't necessarily browse HN at a high enough frequency to outvote or outcomment the majority.
(I personally think the document is very good, on-point, and great advice for ambitious young people. I'm no longer that young any more, and I'm also aware of a different side: when you push really hard, you can end up burning out. That's the other side of the intensity the document advocates. You can burn out. It's the single biggest reason I don't push so hard these days.)
Act with morals, work hard, self-improve, and everything will work out!
I'm not the least or most successful of my peers, but I am sympathetic to bitterness and pretty bitter myself that people aren't better, that banal evil and selfishness and deceit are so omnipresent.
I've founded two start-ups in my life, both still generating revenue and still alive but practically failures for their intent. The first one failed primarily since I didn't know how to execute, had no understanding of business model and distribution, all the classics. The second one I think should have been much more successful were it not for a lot of random factors: covid, scheming employees, much harder sales cycles, etc. You may think I'm rationalizing this, but I've had enough self-doubt to reach this conclusion.
I am jealous of the people that founded start-ups 10 years before me, and which gave bad advice that I realized too late to be bad. But at the same time, does this invalidate my view that the entire ecosystem is deeply corrupt and unfair?
Success and failure are a matter of luck and circumstance to a large degree. This implies that outside of a fee meritorious success stories (see the original 90s video of Bezos arguing why book are best to start as a niche), most success stories in the startup world have no more merit than your own, so why wouldn't you expect negative feelings to exist?
Success doesn't really have a moral component, it's relative to the stated goal. You could argue it's not meaningful or moral or worthwhile or valuable, but you can't deny that he has achieved success.
So the thing you can take away from someone like mr beast is "what made them so effective?". A lot of his strategies could be useful for other, more worthwhile goals than his! So there's something that can be learned. I think that's what people mean, not that "people in tech generally value efficiency".
I found it quite clear. But then I agreed with it.
If you've ever cooked meals for multiple days with just some ground beef, cabbage and some lettuce and friends for ~10 bucks per day, you'll see how crazy expensive a $20 fast food ""meal"" is.
So this is fast food content, because it does entertain, but you could do many things to get good entertainment and also not consume absolute slop.
I think this is you reading this into the comment. They don't mention efficiency.
Reaching the goal is not a moral measurement, it is all about efficiency. If you don't reach the goal, your efficiency is zero. The moral question is what new problems are acceptable. That's where reasonable people can disagree.
The "social purpose of the critiques is universal" is saying that, in opposition to the disparate and varied, personalized, nature of the specific critiques, their social purpose is all the same.
This universal purpose is saying "I felt uncomfortable ... might have to re-evaluate world view ... I'll upvote all the detractors".
> elevated personal impression of erudition
This is ironic, I have to say.
Anyhow, I found it easy to read the comment. It does flow a bit like stream of consciousness, but it's comprehensible, probably in part because I agree with a good amount of it. You shouldn't expect polished prose in comment forums on the interwebs.
If you felt that it talked down to you (personalized), then perhaps evaluate the social purpose of your own comment (did you feel uncomfortable? I got the impression you did).
that is your moral view or value. It is not a universal value.
Economic success is indeed a thing, and it can be discussed separately from moralityl.
by not joining the rat race, you fall behind. This makes you less capable of withstanding the pressure from other rat racers in the world.
Imagine using this logic for survival in the jungle.
That’s seems like a judgement call and a personal one at that. It certainly isn’t a universal value among humanity.
Which is fine, but a 500+ comment HN post where people argue over personal values doesn’t make for interesting reading.
And yes, a lot of manufacturing doesn’t behave this way. That’s the “counter” part of “counter-intuitive” revealing itself.
This comment is yet another of these excellent cases in point!
You really don’t see how “they’re afraid to turn them off even for critical maintenance” might be actually suboptimal behavior in the long run?
To give you an example TSMC might have a factory with 10 expensive EUV lithography tools, each capable of processing 100 wafers per hour. Then they have 4 ovens, each able to bake batches of 500 wafers per hour.
TSMC could improve efficiency by reducing the number of ovens, because they are running only at 50% capacity. But compared to the cost of the EUV tools, the ovens are very cheap. They need to be able to produce at full capacity, even when some ovens breakdown, because stopping the EUV tools because you don't have enough ovens would be much more expensive then operating with spare capacity.
Overwhelming majority of things designed to exploit human imperfections for personal gain are a net bad. Youtube has become one of those things.
Unfortunate, 'cause that's where the money is.
They give the example of picking a filming location you aren’t likely to get permission to film in but would produce outstanding content.
Do you think we should move slower when it comes to saving the planet? From what I can tell your main issue is with the goal, not with efficiency itself.
The reason why I would conflate them is that success had a positive social implication. You get respect if you're successful. In order to separate these concept, I'd use language that doesn't have positive connotations. "Efficient" is more than accurate.
Right, and where is the problem with that again?
I watched one video of MrBeast in the past and the pdf explains well why I actually watched it to the end. I do dislike these kind of videos and don’t watch them but success is success and he does things right. One of his rules which is kind of neat is that the clickbait title and thumbnail needs to deliver on the promise - which is a great concept considering over 97% clickbait isn’t.
> Can you point to the parts of the document, or other resources about Mr. Beast,
> that warrant a comparison with tobacco companies?
If you want to be expert in X, consume content in X (in addition to the deliberate practice and focus on the craft of X).
Regarding sources: if you're genuinely interested and not just being argumentative for argument's sake, you're capable of googling "MrBeast geneva convention" and following the sources from there.
I take your comment as a joke, but have come to the depressing conclusion that too many impressionable people will not understand it that way. They will think it some nugget of wisdom to revert to being a rat in a jungle.
Like, the part about making your co-workers feel like they're bottlenecking you; can't imagine working in an environment where everyone tries that number on everyone else. It's extremely adversarial. Is that really standard management advice? Maybe on Wall Street?
This source is pure gold: techniques to manipulate people into consuming your product - which they otherwise wouldn't be. All so you can make money on poisoning their minds (advertising, which is how you convert views to money). You can easily imagine this came out from a drug cartel boss, I'd expect the best and most ruthless one to operate just like that, with same level of cultishness.
And if that's who Mr Beast is, and that's how he thinks of other people - because believe it or not, viewers are other people too, not some cattle to be milked and slaughtered - then I'm glad I don't watch his videos. Not going to, and I'm happy to pass this document around to dissuade others from viewing his channel.
--
[0] - I mean, that's kind of obvious in anything social media, but rarely do you get it spelled out without any qualms.
This isn't the case here. Most people do not want to be rich at any cost. I might feel some jealousy about Microsoft or wolfram.com, but not about a YouTuber whose massive team produces bland addictive videos, especially if YouTube is full of good videos if you know where to look.
Why waste that 20%?
Because if the tool breaks and scratches a $200K Lexus, then that might be a $20K fix, or possibly even starting from scratch with a new body! Is that worth risking for a $5 drill bit they buy in boxes of 1,000 at a time? No.
Then the interview switched to some guy in America looking miserable complaining how his bosses made him use every tool until breaking point. He listed a litany of faults this caused, like off-centre holes, distorted panels, etc...
And you wonder why Tesla panels have misaligned gaps. Or why rain water leaks into a "luxury" American vehicle!
How much of the ongoing success is algorithmic / network capture?
You see this across all the “old” content networks like YouTube, Instagram and Twitch, that being well-known and putting out aggressively mediocre content trumps being a hidden gem with stellar content.
I dislike TikTok even more than the former, but one thing they do right is having the algorithm weight towards content. A great video by an unknown person is more likely to skyrocket and a mediocre video by a well-known person can easily bomb.
These are metrics one might use even if there’s no algorithm, in fact historically they have. TV shows used to use Neilsen data for similar purposes long before there was YouTube. TV producers would measure audience dropoff and then use that to help writers write more gripping episodes.
Google’s hope with their search for decades was that their algorithm was ungameable and that the way to get your site to the top of any result was to make it the best. That’s why they made it a black box and changed it whenever SEO caught on and used it to push junk to the top.
That’s had mixed results on the web for sure but it’s probably worked much better with video because you can track these metrics in a way you can’t with text. Also with the web, the page you land on may make Google further money (with ad sense, inspiring more Googling, using a Google product directly, etc.) or it may not, they don’t always own the ad service at wherever you land when you click a search result link. They don’t have the pure financial incentive of just showing you what you want, something you want a little less might make them more money.
With YouTube they own it all. The more you watch YouTube the more they make. You’re only clicking ads to other YouTube videos.
Everybody on YouTube knows you want a compelling lead in to get the click over to your video, a hook to keep them watching, etc. He’s codifying what they all already know and do. He just is better at it.
I think it was well written because you could clearly hear his voice through the writing and empathize with his internal struggle with being in a position of authority while also feeling unqualified for the job.
> Did it provide any useful or unique insights?
As someone who has been very frustrated in the past by my perception of the inefficiency of communicating "up and over" instead of talking laterally to an engineer on another team, I thought he succinctly communicated why it's often necessary and helped me understand the value of that practice.
> The writing itself seemed terrible and riddled with spelling errors.
Orthography is only one aspect what makes writing good or bad. And a relatively less relevant one IMO.
> 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.
It is almost certainly not generalizable advice for achieving “success” in the cooperative game of life on earth.
Personally, I find YouTube to be unusable if you think of it as channel-based. What I do is keep a list of topics and perform a search based on the topics.
That pulls in some set of videos, of which maybe about 20-50% are exactly what I want. If the search yields no great results, it's usually because I've gotten the search wrong or the topic isn't well covered on YouTube yet.
With the kids, I don't talk about watching "YouTube", I talk about watching "learning videos" and if they want to watch a learning video, I ask them to tell me what they want to learn before we turn the screens on.
Usually it's building something, like "I want to learn how to build a doll house" or "I want to learn how to make a shark sculpture
Channels are push content, this is more of a pull approach.
I think you're misunderstanding that part. The goal isn't to accuse the coworker. The goal is to explain to the coworker that what they need to do for the project is important to the point where any delays is going to cause a delay for the entire project. This isn't intended to be a negative statement; many projects do rely heavily on certain members getting things in by a particular timeline, and if that isn't communicated and followed up on, projects will fail. The dudebro speech in the document lacks tact, but the underlying principal is sound. The excerpt:
> DO NOT just go to them and say “I need creative, let me know when it’s done” and “I need a thumbnail, let me know when it’s done”. This is what most people do and it’s one of the reasons why we fail so much. I want you to look them in the eyes and tell them they are the bottleneck and take it a step further and explain why they are the bottleneck so you both are on the same page. “Tyler, you are my bottleneck. I have 45 days to make this video happen and I can not begin to work on it until I know what the contents of the video is. I need you to confirm you understand this is important and we need to set a date on when the creative will be done.” Now this person who also has tons of shit going on is aware of how important this discussion is and you guys can prio it accordingly. Now let’s say Tyler and you agree it will be done in 5 days. YOU DON’T GET TO SET A REMINDER FOR 5 DAYS AND NOT TALK TO HIM FOR 5 DAYS! Every single day you must check in on Tyler and make sure he is still on track to hit the target date. I want less excuses in this company. Take ownership and don’t give your project a chance to fail. Dumping your bottleneck on someone and then just walking away until it’s done is lazy and it gives room for error and I want you to have a mindset that God himself couldn’t stop you from making this video on time. Check. In. Daily. Leave. No. Room. For. Error.
But I agree, it's so tempting to get internally focused, or focused on "improvement" that really shifts the focus to something else entirely (hollywood style movies, tv shows, whatever).
Personally I'm no fan of the youtube-ism and youtube generally, but it's clear that game is it's own game. It's not making a movie, it's not a TV show, it's not even tiktok. It's its own thing and it is pretty clear that generally you have to play that platform's game.
My kids play a lot of roblox, and while there's a lot of copy cat games based on traditional gaming, there's almost a system on roblox as far as what games are popular as far as ease of jumping in goes and so on. And there's a lot of weird creativity you find nowhere else as far as the topics of the games (want to be a bug? you can do that). That's it's own space too.
We share a planet with nearly 10 billion other people. Money isn't everything.
Sounds like they're doing their jobs, which is to protect your future selves from your current selves. Sure, finding solutions is great, but faulting them from finding problems and slowing things down until solutions are found is odd.
Yes, security or IT does sometime have to act as a reality check in an organization that has over-hired over-zealous but under-experienced go-getters who want to "move fast and break things". They are a vital counterweight that makes ambition productive, instead of allowing it to wreck the organization's reputation.
I know we're generally concerned with the folks playing fast and loose with the rules here, and that's 100% true, but. I find in big orgs sometimes it's far more on the other end of the spectrum.
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.
Just a question of degree of nastiness? Yes, competitions involving life and death are qualitatively different from competitions involving money. Something interesting to think about is that we do have ultra graphic action movies and horror movies. Are those also net negative?
> Personally, I think human behaviour is massively influenced by culture and that we have an individual moral responsibility to take actions that work in favour of having a healthy culture.
There is no human culture that I know of that was not fascinated by things like money and fame.
> I see arguments often made that amount to justifying amoral, or even actively immoral
I don't think Mr Beast is immoral and not for the reasons you state. I think you have in your mind some very judgemental ideas of what is right and wrong.
I think shows like Mr Beast and all celebrity culture is dumb. I think sports are dumb too. I don't think they are evil and I know that humanity will find a way to create variants of these things no matter what kind of insane rules society tried to put in place.
On the positive side, YouTube has brought the world closer. We can access videos from nearly every corner of the globe, giving us insight into how others live and interact in their environments. Additionally, it's become an incredible resource for information. If something breaks in my home, I can probably find a video explaining how to fix that exact model. While I'm not old enough to have "adulted" without YouTube, it’s amazing how much you can learn from it.
I'm also using youtube almost exclusively as a means of education, but a net positive for us doesn't really mean much. If for one more educated viewer you get ten more radicalised and dumber ones, we may be better off without it.
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.
The thing is, nothing is completely maintenance free, esp. if there's something mechanical. Make wearing parts wear, core parts robust. All my laser printers were Samsung/Xerox (hah), and their "core" is made like a tank. Only its rollers, toner and imaging/drum kits wear down, and these are already consumables.
The device keeps track the life of every of these replaceable components, and you replace them you hit these marks, because they're already worn down to hinder reliable operation (Imager dies at 9K pages, rollers at 20K pages IIRC).
You don't need to make things fail prematurely to make something profitable. First one of these printers didn't have replaceable rollers, so I had to donate it after 11 years of operation. This one is almost 8 years old IIRC, and it's still going strong. I'll be using it as long as I can find spares for it, because it's engineered "correctly", not "for profit". Meantime, its manufacturer can still profit from parts, toner and imaging units.
Bezos won because he is a cutthroat entrepreneur who deeply understands the rules. The Amazon story is a Bezos creation, specifically designed to draw attention away from the ugly parts of Amazon and to make Bezos look like a plucky underdog fighting for consumers. It's a PR narrative and hilariously distorted.
Everyone seems to think that they have the answers to this question... Family, friends, community, god, volunteering at the local soup kitchen..
All over your own wants? If you are a video creator/ creative and that's what gives you energy and all the feel good chems, why not work your ASS off for THE CREATOR of our generation?
Cause from the way i see it, success and the confidence* it brings, solves all other issues.
*As long as you can avoid the pitfall of arrogance.
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.
I think these are clear signs of a dysfunctional organization. I want to associate that with company size (larger -> more bureaucratic, counter-mission nonsense), but I've also seen large companies that don't get caught in these pitfalls. My best guess to lay blame would be at inadequate, out of touch, need-to-be-fired B.o.D and upper and mid-management deadwood. These are the people that propagate such ineffective culture.
I will forever remember the head of IT at my org exclaiming in a meeting, "I'm not here to solve problems". Blew my mind at the time, but it's emblematic and representative of company culture as a whole.
Any good alternatives?
Perhaps this is as much a commentary on the state of labor laws and unions as anything else.
"No, you can't improve the situation with the Linux servers that hasn't been updated since 2013 because those servers don't exist in our roadmap, and therefore there's no policy document that we can lean on to make any decisions. So the servers stay in their miserable state until we can phase over all customers that use those servers to some other product eventually. In a few years. Hopefully."
Note that the above isn't fiction, but exactly what happened a few months ago. Luckily I managed to transfer to a team that didn't have to deal with those servers.
Some people may not like the fact that they pull all nighters, but that's a matter of opinion. Clearly some people do like the terms of employment, otherwise they wouldn't work there.
If you are OK on alternatives, YouTube channel ProjectFarm has some vacuum reviews.
These videos are certainly the best in terms of what money they can make... but are they any good for their consumers?
Just useless brain rot.
No you didn't. You chose to do so.
As I don't think a engineer has ever had the chance to choose a company's CRM, the CRM with better marketing would always win over the CRM with better engineering.
What specific acts are we talking about? "violation of the geneva convention" could mean literally anything between "putting red cross symbols on soldiers" and "summarily executing civilians", so it doesn't really narrow things down. If they're being put in uncomfortable positions, but they're not risking long term harm and it's voluntary, I don't see what the issue is.
This is Hacker News, ostensibly created as a website for hackers and founders.
If you are a hacker and a founder then a ton of this advice is spot on.
For example it's a simple concept but he absolutely nails a key factor by distinguishing between A, B and C employees. A high performing team really can't have more than one or two C's. It moves them out even if they're nice, cool, good people. If the team is run by good humans it does what Mr. Beast does and gives them severance.
I can smell a couple C employees fuming on here and in the Twitter thread. I've had C employees work for me and they were always the ones who lobbied me hardest for being more tolerant of mediocrity. Sorry but you just have to hold the line against the average if you want to succeed, this is dictionary definition level of obvious. To be above average, you have to be above freaking average. Half the world is C's and to win your team needs to not be in that half.
It's more specific, a YouTube video is very different from a TikTok video or an Instagram video.
I was working at Tesla on the CapEx team, and unless you were doing something "interesting", like going to Tahoe or something, then you were expected to be in the office on Saturday and Sunday.
I worked my ass off, pulling 70 hour weeks, catching naps in a conference room when there was a big push. I learned to be energized by my work, seeing the factory cells come together gave me this giant rush. Eventually, I got the thought you had but i worded it differently. "I will never be Elon, working for Elon".
So when Covid hit, i got put fully remote and started having some conversations with potential clients to launch my own consultancy. After a couple of months, our managers told us to start coming back into office. I had gotten some traction with the consultancy, so i decideded to "do [myself] a favour and do it as a leader where [i] call[ed] the shots and have the equity instead of as a follower."
At first it was great! I was learning an absolute ton, designed my own website from scratch, wrote a bunch of automation code, my sales ration was like 85% because i was just calling on all my old associates and references of references... life was great!
Then after i scaled, I realized I wasn't actually doing anything... I have these meetings, and my schedule is always swamped with evaluating this peice of software/this person, generating "Work" for different people, and i freaking hated it! I stopped learning... I had no peers, only employees. I had "Mentors" but my consultancy was so nitch so outside "Executive mentorship" i had no one to guide me. I tried to focus on growth opportunities within the company, scaling different verticles as different companies and other things to keep my mind working, but i slowly but surely lost interest. I couldn't push myself 70 hours a week because i didn't have anyone pushing me, and i hated "Consulting".
but every chance i got i would be watching drone videos over the Giga Texas progress. I kept up with every SpaceX, Tesla update ever...
And suddenly i realised, i deeply missed working at Tesla... i don't want to be Elon...
But that Elon is building some pretty cool shit, and factories, robots, automation is super cool and fun.
So i sold my consultancy for 1.5X revenues (Pretty shit deal but i wanted out). It didn't give me fuck you money but i could have chilled for a bit...
but now I'm happily working my ass off back at Tesla, fulfilling Elons dream. But i get to "Give up my life" to get to play with robots all day. I'm learning a ton again, i love my team, and i've never met a smarter group of people.
I don't have some One Right Answer to what the best thing to do with your life is, but I'm comfortable having a personal - but strong - opinion on a rough ordering that, for instance, puts family and friends much higher than a life dedicated to "THE CREATOR of our generation". Maybe you think that sounds impressive? I think it just sounds very sad.
You seem to be of the belief that for anyone to be the most successful at this field they have to be gaming an algorithm. But perhaps there’s really no algorithm, or perhaps (my opinion) the algorithm is so good at showing people what they want that you can instead just focus on making videos people want.
This is a deeply naive understanding of employment.
Almost no one has a huge array of job opportunities, and they can select the one they want based on company culture.
Most people have one viable job offer at a time, and they have to work hard for it. This is even more true in entertainment fields. Many people in entertainment feel lucky to be a paid employee at all, and they can't choose between a job that requires all-nighters and one that doesn't.
"People who realize the ramifications of the proposed route of action beyond 'it makes the number bigger'" finding problems and trying to stop things from happening instead of finding solutions.
There. Fixed it.
Lots of Yt videos have crazy thumbnails; only MrBeast follows through!
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...
Of course, the company's best response to that concern would be to make the batteries easily replaceable, including by third-party products. But that's where job #2 comes in: make sure the consumer has to buy a new Dyson sooner rather than later.
This is false. HN is hosted by YC, and as such promotes YC ventures. On the front page right now is the following link (with disallowed comments and upvotes):
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/continue/jobs/smcxRnM-...
[sic] means "I copied the word as written in its original, and it was already written that way" [0].
Well one choice you might make is to hire some number of 'mediocre people' instead of one 'A-player'; the ratio of more junior to more senior; etc.
Seen some ERP's for mid-sized customers and the good ones makes it easy to build views and otherwise customize the software up to a point for non-engineers. The code is shit but they've also produced a lot of things needed internally that we wouldn't have gotten done quickly enough by doing it manually.
For example, locking a dude in a room for days on end with no mental health evaluation beforehand to see if he can handle the psychological stress that might induce. Or having said dude run a marathon on a treadmill without any training. Or running illegal lotteries. Or fixing the outcomes of game shows.
Some of those things "make the best YouTube video possible" but are profoundly abusive at the least and outright illegal at worst. If you can't do the video without doing those things, you shouldn't do the video and should focus on human factors instead of the money you're missing out on, like a person without psycopathy might.
What his videos are lacking in my opinion is the quality of scenario and planning. They build an expensive set, give away a large prize but the challenges are either too simple or not very creative. Too little challenges, too little competition, too little motivation, too little expressing of personality like mutual help, sacrificing or betrayal, too little unexpected scenario twists. In this aspect they are not as good as TV shows. As an extreme example, take "give away money to random people" series. What fun is in getting money for nothing? And watching that is probably 100x more boring.
I don't really care for Mr Beast (but don't think about him much either) and I don't think this is especially revelatory stuff, but I think most of it is pretty sound advice for how to be effective.
"Our audience is massive and because of that you have to be simple, for 50 million people to understand something it must be simple."
> Your goal here is to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible. That’s the number one goal of this production company. It’s not to make the best produced videos. Not to make the funniest videos. Not to make the best looking videos. Not the highest quality videos.. It’s to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible.
You can get billions of views and total YouTube dominance without making particularly engaging content, and I think that's the interesting point here.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YaG9xpu-WQKBPUi8yQ4HaDYQLUS...
I'll leave it to you all to debate the ethics of MrBeast's videos, YouTube, and the questionable value of these videos.
Meanwhile, the most fascinating part of this is a glimpse into a new kind of media company, where he instituted a particular process and approach and scaled it up outside of the initial set of producers.
You get the sense he's flying by the seat of his pants into a whole new world, and he's creating the org and the processes on the fly based on what's been successful so far.
The energy, drive and enthusiasm required to create a new model of not only "product" (even one that solely exists to please the algorithm) and company is fascinating.
There are more parallels to startup founders than one might admit.
It just about makes some sort of sense in the context of something like giving up a professional career in a developed country and moving to a remote African village to do aid work, but giving up your life to make a tonne of money creating viral YouTube videos is an absurd description.
It is a startup and he is a founder. There are no parallels, he is simply an example. His video production company is very similar to other entertainment companies catering to the same audience like roblox (studios) or mobile gaming startups in general.
YouTube is 99% junk and just because 1% of it is decent, that doesn’t make up for the 99%.
Like, MrBeast seems like a media startup which is different than, say, a SaaS startup or an AI assistant startup. Fair enough?
You can safely say that if the battery pack's total capacity drops under 75%, disable it, or detect dead cells and take action.
Disabling life prolonging features while having a full MCU and a nice battery IC on board smells fishy to me.
This account name is not my real name, but I have thought about making an HN account with my real name. Mostly I just try to spend less time on HN these days.
As a hypothetical, let's say you believe from prior experience that being mugged has a very high probability. Let's say 50% because it's easier.
Let's also say your friend points out that you've left your home hundreds of times this year and haven't been mugged. 50% seems like a ridiculous overestimate.
Reexamining your priors would involve not only changing your mind about the chance of being mugged, but changing downstream beliefs that might be influenced by that belief (such as what public policies you support).
You copy this communication in your non-profit organization that feeds starving children and find that you are able to feed 50% more children when communicating with this more efficient method.
This is not "literally cocaine logic", it's learning from others.
To use an example you'll probably agree with more: You can hate the lyrics of a given musical artist but copy their production style and in doing so give your lyrics a better platform from which to be heard.
Methods != end goals
You can adapt effective methods currently used to accomplish questionable things to accomplish more noble things.
although, to be perfectly honest, I doubt you'd learn much from Mexican drug cartels that would apply to software, as the markets are completely different.
the job is to make YouTube videos that people click and watch
What gets them to watch and stick is a few things but notably wow factor, something crazy they haven’t seen before
The bar for wow factor keeps rising
Therefore you need to keep learning driving better and better results. Otherwise you are out
You need to take ownership for results to avoid delays at all costs.
Operationally, so many people would benefit from understanding bottlenecks, critical components, etc
It feels a little silly to say "a more ethical organization doesn't deal with such things"
If we're here to discuss the links, then it's a little frustrating to have a hundred responses by people who haven't read the doc or are unable to set aside their preconceptions about someone saying things that feel fairly off topic to the top level comment
> but if you find yourself casting away the ethical doubts too easily, you might be in a dangerous spot to begin acting unethical yourself
Oh please. If I start a company and link this doc? Sure, then raise some concerns. If I am reading it and finding interesting operational advice about getting things done or inter team communication, I'm not particularly worried about becoming antisocial or accidentally behaving immorally (perhaps amorally is more apt)
As one of many examples, the ww2 channel is quite different but also financially successful: https://www.youtube.com/@WorldWarTwo
Indeed, and that's why OP wrote its list of counterpoints. In theory, a company can make a lot of money by creating products that are aligned with users' interests. Unfortunately, in today's world this is more difficult to do rather than taking advantage of users in some way. Still, if we don't oppose these practices there will never be a change, so it's worth fighting for our rights as users.
I assumed that's what all his videos were for years and hadn't ever watched any (given I am not a child, among other reasons), but I gave one a chance out of curiosity and found myself surprisingly enjoying some of the competition videos. The competitions are often well-designed and adeptly narratively structured.
The goal would be to be more customer-focused in those cases.
"No one prospers without rendering benefit to others." — Tadao Yoshida, founder of YKK zippers, https://ykkamericas.com/our-philosophy/
With MrBeast, the "best YOUTUBE video" would be one that causes engagement with the viewer throughout the video:
> The creative process for every video they produce starts with the title and thumbnail. These set the expectations for the viewer, and everything that follows needs to be defined with those in mind. If a viewer feels their expectations are not being matched, they’ll click away - driving down the crucial Average View Duration that informs how much the video is promoted by YouTube’s all-important mystical algorithms.
You have to both entice the viewer with the thumbnail/title, and meet the expectations of the viewer so they continue watching.
Your counterexamples are a bunch of instances where the company did not meet customer expectations.
Anyone who watches 99% of media should not find scripting to be a surprise. And many posting here on HN, who have given technical talks and presentations definitely do some level of preparation/script in advance. You can tell which people on YouTube/TikTok/etc actually prepare and have a script - against those who just ramble on with absolutely no plan outside of "this is a cool thing I like, that I want to talk about for far too long". (I watch alot of DIY/maker style videos)
Because - even if it is "unscripted" - there are soooo many hours of footage required to cut together even a short news interview segment. Many many years ago, I was interviewed for a short (5m) segment on "wardriving". The camera crew and interviewer took more than 8 hours to get all of their footage/angles and my various sound-bites for 5 minutes of aired footage. (And who knows how long in the edit room) It was eye-opening for me.
As to your second to last comment, I wouldn't have even mentioned it had the other commenter not mentioned how they found the prose jarring. To your question in your final line, I didn't say that I felt I was being talked down to, I said that the author seemed like he thought he was talking down to an audience below him, such as with his line where he mentions his startup friends whom he shared his text with, but wouldn't share the same with HN.
They can provide input regarding e.g. maintainability, but majority of input would come from other stakeholders - users and business unit owning the customers whose relationship we want managed, ideally primarily. And it is somebodys job to take these inputs into collective whole.
It was a mind blowing exercise to me 15 years ago when I was telling my boss how horrible our current installation of some ERP software was, and be asked me what's the user perspective. They log in every day, run financial reports they need, and log out. The system was great from their perspective! They had even less concern for my perspective of poor architecture and suboptimal implementation, than I (at that point) had of their perspective and goals. Thank krishna I didn't make the decisions on the CRM :-)
I don't think any of these contestants would be doing it with a gun to their head. ergo, they had a choice on whether to do it. We don't know whether they were informed choices, but I assume they were (giving people the benefit of the doubt here).
Note this is MrBeast doing it to himself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_CbgLpvH9E
I think that changes the ethics a bit. If he decides to potentially psychologically torment himself for his channel, I don't think it's a big deal that he didn't give himself a mental health evaluation beforehand.
(I'm aware he has a similar video with random contestants as well. But either way, I think this particular criticism is a little too hand-wringy. It's not being forced upon anyone and they can leave at any time.)
IMO the biggest issue is the allegation he rigs some of the game shows. That's definitely unethical.
> Many people in entertainment feel lucky to be a paid employee at all
And this is BY CHOICE.
I fundamentally disagree with your positioning.
The best way to get employees to think like equity owners is to give them equity. But I guess the name of the game in our times is to somehow expect people with no equity to work even harder for the company than the equity holders do, right? Let me know how that works out.
What was the price(s) of that start up and what was the prices of Salesforce? What were the features of the start up and that of Salesforce?
Different people think different things are "nice" (correctly or incorrectly). If you're offering things that you think are nice, but the customer does not care about, are you surprised that they go elsewhere?
You also have to understand what customers say they want, and the things that they are actually going to evaluate on: the two may not be the same.
And even if we want the nice things, we may not actually be able to afford them.
Presumably the issue is not the result but rather the means and cost. The practice of justifying the means with the ends is famously behavior most people try to avoid sharing a society with and, in fact, behavior people generally try to end once discovering.
EDIT: To be sure, employees could be quite happy there and there's little negativity to discuss—but the tone in the above post raised concerns.
I thought it was well understood that this kind of misalignment is the cost of someone afraid to admit outloud what the goal is.
Mr. Beast, like Hollywood production companies before him, can say "don't forget, your job is lowest common denominator slop."
This is hacker news, so take a tech giant (doesn't matter which) and imagine what it would mean for leadership to tell the rank and file what their actual goals were. For starters it would be internally demoralizing, externally scandalous, and include mens rea for many of their legal "whoopsie daisies" over the years.
This is a nit-pick, but for the record, The Pinto didn't explode at higher rates than other similar automobiles, also there wasn't an internal Ford Memo, it was an attachment to a letter to the NHTSA --but all people remember is the this so called "memo" Anyhow a myth was born and it seemingly refuses to die. By the numbers:
In 1975-76, the Pinto averaged 310 fatalities a year. But the similar-size Toyota Corolla averaged 313, the VW Beetle 374 and the Datsun 1200/210 came in at 405.
Additional info: https://newmarksdoor.typepad.com/mainblog/2005/07/the_pinto_...
What's the thing I'm missing that makes this cynical?
Plenty of counterexamples for this as well. Snake oil salesmen, drug dealers, woo peddlers, gurus, politicians, grifters, scammers, thieves, and on and on...
The example I always go to is U-Haul in the US. They have a functional monopoly on quickly getting a pickup truck or small box car. I used to tell people there was no need to own a pickup truck because I could go grab one for $30 once or twice a month when I needed it.
After a year of shitty apps, constantly being sold things I didn't need because they try to secretly upsell you 50 times during checkout. Having to go into the store to get the keys and wait in line for 1 hour behind people screaming about how they were cheated... I bought a truck.
U-Hual still has their monopoly, but they lost my business, not because I went to a competitor, but because I altered my life to no longer need their business.
Maybe instead of buying eink tablets, I would have kept printing things had printers been better products.
They're not saying make the best product possible, they're saying make the product that sells the most despite quality.
Contrast that with very traditional Hollywood media - yes, of course they want to get people to watch their shows, but for the most part they try do that via a story and art. Not hacking peoples brains.
His content is like "Reality TV" on steroids. I don't watch or believe in traditional "Reality TV" either. Both are trash content - amongst the lowest forms of "entertainment" available.
For example, millions of people would not call him a success because he doesn't have a family with children (although Mr beast has definitely implied he wants one in the future).
Many millions more would say that he's not a success because he doesn't do anything that's a net positive for society, instead he's mostly a drain on people's time and mental capacity.
Interesting that you say this regarding YouTube. I've been saying this regarding Twitter for awhile even though I consume quite a bit of YouTube content. However, I've curated my YouTube feed to be almost entirely stuff that is interesting, educational, and that I think I'm getting value from. I've learned tons of useful stuff from YouTube such as how to dress better and tailor my own clothes, how to fix things that break around my house, more effective training methods to accomplish specific fitness goals...I could go on and on. When I go to YouTube in incognito mode, I definitely see the bottom-of-the-barrel content that you're talking about. But it doesn't have to be that way.
Ok, but the methods (hustle, grind-culture, high pressure on marks) are here just as questionable as the end goals (Be the biggest Youtuber).
What can you learn from Mr. Beast? Nothing that a lack of conscience and some basic psychology of engagement couldn't teach you.
To reuse your analogy, what if you could communicate information by arranging the corpses of your enemies in a certain pattern, then use international news reports to get the messages across.
What could this teach us about communication? Nothing.
Yeah, I can't really understand why someone would craft a persona with a unique bespoke name and then name the company the same thing other than to try to make sure that the company is viewed as synonymous with the persona.
- Exploiting his employees to a degree that could be considered torture (Yes, we need to keep you awake in solitary confinement for the time-lapse video)
- Hiring Delaware a known Sex Offender, and not keeping him away from children.
> I think this should be obvious to anyone old enough to not think santa's real.
Some people assumed the story is real, and knowing it is fake lessens the impact of his contests and story arcs in his videos (Mac's trials hit different when you realize it's scripted).
Only problem is that everyone else also has figured that out so hard to secure one.
Given the current landscape of crass hype beasts with all the peacocking vs the "follow your heart" microaggressions crowd it's easy to see those texts were written, but just like today's "tech company's" that "invent" things that existed for decades already, this is nothing new and it's a sign of a culture with very little oversight based on smoke and mirrors. Ironically this is exactly what the distilled core of "Corporate America" is and we all know what "results at all costs" lead to: See Wall Street, Boeing, etc.
Personally I never cared for the guy, it always looked tremendously fake and dishonest to me, to to each each own. IMO there is nothing new o special about this case, there are little dramas like these all over millions of organizations around the World.
We've gotten tons of blow back as other teams use the product and find it next to useless with tons of bugs, and I'm stuck trying to push it. Not a fun place to be.
Learned a lot about the software market and capitalism though.
"#TeamTrees vs. REALITY" (2019, Phil Mason) https://youtu.be/gqht2bIQXIY
Steve Jobs would be non existent in terms of ver getting off the ground without Steve Wozniak.
Another visionary without the ability to execute and deliver.
It’s good they got together.
They were the ones that stirred up a bunch of controversy, but had some former employee experiences in them.
I have no idea about he greater situation but I think that’s what the comment is referencing.
Mr Beast is talking about actual experts in incredibly niche things, like baking giant cakes. Completely different type of person to the extent that "consultant" is just a total misnomer if you're used to the term in the land of F1000 corpo-speak. Mr Beast is probably reaching out to people guerilla-style that don't even have "consulting" firms -- which makes total sense if you're doing crazy stuff on YouTube.
This feels to me like an intentionally hostile reading of the content. I think all of us have had the experience of working with a co-worker who is either brilliant but extremely prone to going down rabbit holes, or a co-worker who seems to have a completely different idea of what we’re doing than everyone else. “Make the best YouTube videos possible, not the highest quality” is the same sentiment behind “eventually you have to actually ship your software”. It’s the same sentiment behind the derision in the term “architecture astronaut”. It’s the same sentiment behind the “worse is better” axiom. It’s the same sentiment behind “don’t let perfect be the enemy of good”. In other words you need to know what it is that pays your bills and be laser focused on delivering that. A YouTube channel isn’t the place to make art house silent films. A community theater production isn’t the place to practice your improv comedy skills. If your company sells a database, it’s not the place to be writing memory safe shells in rust to replace bash, no matter how annoying maintaining your startup bash scripts are.
His employees are probably payed well, but obviously don't make as much as he. So I guess asking them to give up their lives for less compensation is to say their lives are or less value...
I agree that doing meaningless work is soul crushing even if well-compensated.
It seems like it ought to be possible to do meaningful work without working 80 hour weeks, but maybe not!
And owning your own business isn't necessarily an easy 40 hours a week and don't think about it when you're not working, but sounds like you did have a lighter schedule? Or actually you didn't mention that! If you traded a 70-hour week as a well-compensated employee doing meaningful work for a 70-hour week being your own boss with possibility of making more money doing meaningless work -- yeah, I would make the same choice between those two! But I'd rather not have a 70 hour week, be reasonably compensated, and do meaningful work, if that were an option...
But we kind of forgot what we're talking about here... pretty sure nobody working for Mr Beast thinks it's meaningful work, and if they do, I'm worried about them.
We? I was IT for a brief period and one day management says "We need this Salesforce Outlook plugin deployed to all the front office users." No one bothered to tell us "Hey, we're evaluating CRM software and would appreciate your technical opinion."
So there's your "we" and I'm sure they weren't looking for quality engineering or rock solid code when deciding. In fact it was picked because the manager heard the name salesforce at some business conference and was told by someone there it was the best CRM out there so you better get on that train or be left in the dust. So we installed the plugins, got paid and moved on with life. And to be honest we didn't care either.
I've always wanted to be able to tell people they're the bottleneck. I've had talks with management about this. "We need to tell people bluntly so they understand the impact they're having."
Nope, it could hurt a relationship and relationship is more important than delivering.
I don't want to be an ass, but I do love this approach by Mr. Beast.
Those creators are still making orders of magnitude less money than people who make zero content attention grabbing controversy meme slop videos.
That's certainly true. I'm surprised there wasn't an embedded provocative thumbnail for the document at the very top.
oh really did you try searching because I found one in about two seconds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1qXIkr05tk
What Donaldson has done is effectively hack the Youtube algorithm, and as a hobby content creator for the last 10 years or so, I find it has been absolutely destructive to the "content" world. He's absolutely right - you're not trying to make the best content, or the best video, or whatever - you're trying to make the best YOUTUBE video, implicitly admitting what youtube floats to the top of recommendation algorithms is NOT any of those things. It's hyper optimized to be as addictive and as least satiating mentally as possible, it's entertainment junk food. At least old-school reality TV had semi interesting people on it.
It's just very saddening for me to watch the "beastification" of youtube and the overall creator space. I make content because I like making it. I make the content I would like to watch. It's secondary to me whether anyone else enjoys it, and that kind of creative spirit is absolutely gone on the web, and I completely believe content quality has suffered from it. To some degree the audience is the problem for demanding it, as sibling comments have pointed out, but I think this is blaming the victim a bit. Youtube also pushes these addicting videos out to people and highly incentivizes it. It'd be like handing out cigarettes at the hospital and blaming the subset of people that get addicted. Sure, it's their fault, but the hospital probably shouldn't be doing that in the first place.
HN feels like a bunch of people bitter about AI, bitter about social media, bitter about the Saas model, bitter about Crypto, bitter about ads, bitter about privacy, bitter about capitalism, bitter about Elon Musk, bitter about every damn thing imaginable. Like a bunch of grumpy old men, we don’t like new things here, the 90s were the peak of the internet and computing apparently.
The archetype HN holds in highest regard would be an anonymous European socialist lone Mother Theresa/Jack Reacher hacker living off the grid (privacy reasons, of course) and grinding away at open source dev utilities out of the goodness of their heart. Anything outside of that? Profit maximizing drivel intended to trick the dumb masses!
Now that said they should still try to advance the mission within that framework, and not be lazy.
> The three metrics you guys need to care about is Click Thru Rate (CTR), Average View Duration (AVD), and Average View Percentage (AVP).
> How to measure the success of content
> Like I said at the start of this the metrics you care about in regards to virality are CTR, AVD, and AVP. If you want to know if the contents of a video are good, just look at the AVD and AVP of a video after we upload it.
I think it's meaningless to criticize MBs content because it's a kids show. Of course it's formulaic and predictable. And I dislike his content too, and blocked him from my feed a year or two ago.
Newton, Steve Jobs, Marie Curie...the list goes on. These people's success wasn't a product of balance or moderation
> Replace "youtube videos" with whatever the company is trying to achieve.
I see a lot of unnecessary negative sentiment towards that quote.
The quote has no hidden meaning and should be taken on face value: I could easily see an up-and-coming producer work for Mr. Beast, and get sidetracked with making sure that pixels are "perfect." Or a set designer making sure that a specific prop is placed "perfectly." That's not the point, and Mr. Beast is very upfront about it.
I actually admire that quote.
Power tool batteries have BMS, better chargers, and if you have multiple batteries, you get infinite vacuuming powers.
The problem is that the kind of people who are ambitious enough to think this sounds like a good idea often (maybe usually) get sucked deeply into it.
But yep, I do think it's a reasonable model if you can avoid that outcome and get in and out early in your career.
What you say is also valid but in between, is a lot of grey. For example, should the federal government in your country issue standardised IDs to citizens? A lawyer may point to privacy regulations and say no but there are lots of benefits. If a workaround exists, should we simply ignore those benefits?
This quote describes how things should be, not how things actually are.
See I didn’t read it that way at all. I read that as a statement of a concept I’ve always heard about when coordinating between groups. Effectively “pick a person in the other group to be your liaison and your counterpart and coordinate directly, don’t just throw stuff over the wall and hope someone picks it up”. It’s the same basic psychological concept as “in an emergency situation pick one person in the crowd, point them out and tell them personally to go call 911”. Diffusion of responsibility means people will delay or stuff will get dropped. To make things happen you have to make sure things are assigned. Surely this isn’t particularly surprising or controversial right? It’s why large teams often appoint “interrupt” workers who are appointed to specifically answer out of band requests coming in. It’s why you have an on call rotation instead of just paging the entire company if something goes down. It’s why agile appoints a “scrum master” whose singular mission is to clear up blocking issues for the team. It’s why if you don’t assign people to work on maintenance, maintenance won’t get done.
I read that part of the document as saying “if you’re in charge of producing a video due in 45 days, don’t just send a general request for someone to make a script to the writing department, pick a person and get on the same page about what needs to be done and when”
Informal science the lambo show has a question, hypothesis and actual test. It’s just not academic, but the results form legit qualitative data that can be used in a formal presentation if one should so choose.
I can read between the lines but choose not to.
I have not misread you are the one making comparisons to rape and using examples like “concentration camp” and torture. It is entirely true to say your language is over the top.
I’m glad you’re done. But I don’t agree with your accusations at all.
Sure, but the production DB has an incredible amount of PII and we are audited out the wazoo, but even if that weren't the case and it was totally fine, all it takes is you being careless with your credentials one time and the company's hosed or we have a massive breach, or some rogue employee encrypts the data with ransomware. So, yes, it would make you faster, and no, you can't have it. It's insane how often I have this type of conversation and insane how often I am the bad guy in it.
Great, don't force it on your employees. I am not working for you for anything other than a paycheck and flexible working conditions and stimulating work.
Yes, their role is defense, but not insofar as to remove the profitability of the organization. In several orgs now I've seen the legal team blow contracts and the security team break the product and the IT team break development in the name of performing their role "correctly".
Brainless box checking is not part of defense, you must be willing to critically think about how to fit your role to your product or organization's profit motive.
For some businesses being efficient means there is a side-effect of destroying the planet. For others it's causing customers/employees long-term health effects like cancer. Many industries that are considered highly profitable have these types of things -- think pharmaceuticals (legal or not), lending, gambling.
"Success" in a business generally means being profitable. Usually this requires being "efficient" but being efficient isn't the goal. Neither is "Net good for society/humanity at large" -- at least not the main one, taking priority over being profitable.
Agreed.
> The videos of people creating, fixing, coding, diagnosing, doing every day random things - those are a gift to humanity.
These seem like the outliers.
I didn't really find anything in the pdf outrageous except this line.
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.
Advertisers and people seeking behavior modification out of populations are YouTube's customers. MrBeast understands this. The MrBeast goal is to get and stay #1 at whatever YouTube wants, for the purpose of being #1 at whatever YouTube wants. That purpose can be any number of things, MrBeast doesn't care. It's purpose-agnostic.
The one area that I'm wondering a bit on is the statement that you need to be working on multiple 'videos' aka projects at 1 time and if your not then your a FAILURE... so whose priority list is "prio" when, lets say, you are working on 5-10 projects? And they all have prios/emergencies etc.... Interesting expectation setting here. And concludes with a rather harsh statement too with the "failed as a MrBeast employee that day"...
For reference: Work on multiple videos EVERYDAY Please do not come in and only work on one video during a workday. That’s how you fall behind on future videos and create a nasty cycle that i’m trying to stop. If you drop everything and go all in on a video for 3 days then that’s 3 days your other videos will fall behind and eventually you’ll have to drop other videos to focus on those videos and it will snowball into you can’t do anything but focus on what’s right in front of you because you murdered any lead time you had. If you ever only work on one video during a day, you failed as a MrBeast employee that day
Mark Rober has turned into very content-driven since a few years ago. He used to spend more time on explaining how the science works. His “toys” are also copycat from existing competitors
Why? I specifically mentioned Hollywood to try avoid the rose colored glasses and just skip to the matter of fact stage. If it's just churning out content then it's just churning out content.
> Liz Lemon (friendly, trying to gain favor): Whatcha guys working on?
> Ritchie (Deadpan): Piece for the Today Show about how next month is October.
This is the intractable and unavoidable problem with the use of KPIs as a management tool: Goodhart's Law -- any metric used as a target ceases to be a good measure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
You are -- literally -- telling the team, "go make this KPI number go up. Your entire job performance will be evaluated on that basis." It is unsurprising that the team therefore focuses on making that number go up.
If you want teams to consider the goals of the company, or anything at all besides their KPIs, don't use KPIs.
I do, and I reject being branded as part of "we" here; most people and orgs just have bad taste. ("Taste" at an organizational level obviously being an emergent property rather than literally the same as the homonymous trait in individuals.)
Note I said mostly. Of course there were older people, but they were in their 40s and early 50s. They were few and far between, and they were the "adults" in the room when needed. It worked really well.
I know an "anti nitpicker" who is entirely opposite to that attitude when it comes to their social appearance and perception. One hair on their tie is catastrophic. One publicly searchable webpage that shows a decades old picture of them is an extreme problem that warrants hiring a company to clean up. It's interesting how, in matters that are important to some of these people, seemingly inconsequential and irrelevant details suddenly matter to an extraordinary degree.
The anti nitpicking stance is a byproduct of the extreme overvaluation of social perception. Often these people do not like to look like they have made a mistake. And thus they avoid conflict or paint it as irrelevant in belief that it will save their appearance.
Nobody is forcing anything on anybody here so there's no need to end your thought with a defiant coda.
> If you want to engage in this type of culture because it helps you fit in with founders; fine, that's your own brain you're messing with.
You misunderstand the objection I hinted at. Which is fine. I'm not pro-"marketing bullshit" because it's not an either/or choice. What I object to is taking a perfectly normal word someone uses and then choosing a narrow, fraught, medical interpretation of the word to ascribe to them a viewpoint of, essentially, "they want you to be mentally ill!"
Initial growth on someone else's platform is a good idea. However, once you see some small success, it's best to think about diversifying. Mr. Beast has already done this. He's essentially his own brand now.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/14/24101023/ftc-doj-comment-...
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.
In short, they've milked every bit of nostalgia you may have for their characters, I mean their properties, as long as humanly possible and then some.
I don't even have any nostalgia for these characters. They were a really fringe phenomenon in my country. But do you think that means we don't get the 20+ Marvel movies shoved down our throats? Oooh, no. We'll eat what we're served, or not go to the movies at all (that's the option I choose). If you wanted to make a parody of hamfisted, audience-contemptous cultural imperialism, you couldn't do better than Marvelwood.
Ask me how I know you didn’t read the handbook! Over 50% of the audience is >=25
Yes, you and people like you can seek out the best browser extensions, install them, understand how to use them, and can curate a nicely tended online garden for yourself, and this is genuinely great. But "we live in a society", even you are subject to wider trends of how people around you live their lives and spend their time. And average people's front page is filled with slop and AI generated chum and Youtube-face thumbnails etc. While you can configure ublock origin to remove irrelevant recommendations from the middle of search results, the average person browses the internet without adblock and sinks hours into mindlessly scrolling social media.
Our parents worried about us staring at the TV all day, and today we have that on super steroids.
It's super hard to avoid rabbit holes. Once the recommender engine picks up on something you find interesting it will exploit that with no end.
The mind numbing stuff can be highly specific that no human TV program manager would ever think up. For example, I clicked a few videos about cow and horse hoof trimming and horseshoe applications. Kinda interesting, geeking out on skilled crafts like this, never seen it done in real life, maybe I learn something interesting! And a few days later I find myself regularly clicking these because I get so many of these now on my frontpage and I kind of take a step back and think, is this really time well spent? Watching hoof after hoof being trimmed? (By the way, these videos have millions of views each, and have entire channels dedicated to producing them over and over again. It's an entire genre, not just a few videos.)
I see this stuff with family members too. Zoning out and watching repetitive crap, like the hydraulic press channel, red hot ball, a guy who cleans up backyards, powerwashing objects, dashcam crashes, arrest bodycam footage, pimple popping, mukbang. (And I'm not even getting into political outrage stuff, that's a topic to itself.) Once Youtube figures out which type of repetitive brain-numbing genre you respond to, it will push it. It takes more self-awareness to get back in control than a lot of people have. Some of these "genres" are shockingly weird, like jigger removal (a kind of larva) from dog paws. I don't know if this has been studied properly. It's kind of like a non-sexual version of fetishes. Highly specific and somehow repetitively able to "tickle" one's brain, and while it's soothing and satisfying to some, it's disgusting and weird to others, pretty much like sexual fetishes.
At this point I’m convinced any great company follows this same principle. I also strongly believe in this in my startup.
But I’ve been finding it super hard to find employees or founding team members with this kind of mindset.
How do you spot these people?
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...
No other streaming platform offers a video catalog that covers nearly all aspects of human activities.
This has never existed in all of humanity.
Out of curiosity, what's wrong with Intel? Are you referring to their selling more capable parts for more money? If so, that does not strike me as a shady practice to maximize profits. More like how the best fruit goes for export, where it can fetch the most return.
But also... this isn't doing well for Boeing? It's costing the money? I don't think Boeing is a template for success.
Sure it would be hard to measure - but you could argue that money is money consumers lost as a result of Mr Beast (or maybe YouTube as a whole).
For example, looking to the tobacco industry: they were incredibly economically successful because they leveraged the weaknesses of the human brain to sell their product, namely nicotine addiction. This is now largely considered immoral, but let's look past that.
We can still measure the badness, or harm, of the tobacco industry objectively. We see how much money was/is spent on cancer treatment, COPD treatment, etc. These analysis have been done before and it's pretty damning, billions of dollars. In some cases, the cost of tobacco straight up exceeds the profit. Meaning, from a communal economic standpoint, they are a net-negative. Yes, it's true, tobacco, while wildly popular, is economically in the red.
Of course, we live in a staunchly capitalistic, individualistic society. Communal economic cost/benefit is almost never looked at. Which is why we had the problems with the tobacco industry, and why the obesity epidemic grows. Mr Beast videos are not of this scale, but I would argue they are of this nature.
Legit, but you're not thinking this all the way through. As an organization grows you'll have people whose primary duty is risk mitigation, without the executive authority to pick up the phone and spend resources on implementing, identifying, or seeking a solution. Indeed, if they spend too much time solutioneering, it will limit their ability to do the job they were hired for. Then they get punished for going too far. The sort of initiative-taking and ownership that works great in a startup can get someone fired in a larger org.
He was a tiny YouTuber 6 years ago with under a million subscribers, and has become the biggest despite tens of thousands of competitors who were better placed than him. The difference between just a few short years ago and now is what impresses me and makes me consider him a success, he has gone from a one man show counting numbers in his room to a million to the biggest on the platform with many other ventures.
Expecting your workers to never make the same mistake twice is extremely harsh and only works if you are comfortable with a lot of volatility in team structure & in an employer's market.
Some come from the zeitgeist, others are eternal, biblical, and worse, unfalsifiable: "everything happens for a reason," "if you're meant to be together, you will be together," "just do a good job and you'll get what you deserve". The latter was voiced by my postdoc advisor, who did not take the time to look at the percentage of researchers who did good work but did not get a tenure-track position. But perhaps those who did not find jobs did not do good enough work, and the charade continues.
The Jetblue thing is also not really altruistic, but a nice side effect of an optimization they did; the removal of the seats brought the capacity to their planes to a round number of 50, which happens to be the FAA required ratio of persons per flight attendant.
meaning i would translate obsession -> dedication in common language.
The only information about this obsession in the document is about learning, and there is a specific mention that people are judged based on results and not hours, so I am willing to say that this language is much less alarming than what I heard in my experience in startups.
• Fourth Wing and Iron Flame are poorly written fantasy romances that blew up on TikTok.
• Haunting Adeline and Hunting Adeline are poorly written dark romances(https://www.reddit.com/r/RomanceBooks/comments/uu1age/what_d... they're also antisemitic QAnon fan fiction.
• Three books with bare chested men on the covers. These indicate that there's lots of sex scenes; no one reads them for plot.
• Icebreaker is a poorly written hockey romance. The author is ignorant about college, hockey, and the US to say the least.
• Credence is a contemporary romance that's best known for sex scenes and toxic relationships.
• A Court of Thorns and Roses and A Court of Mist and Fury. Both of these are mediocre fantasy romances by Sarah J. Maas; she's the Dan Brown of romance.
While Microsoft as a whole is still quite strong, Ford and Boeing lost significant market position and the losses are partially attributed to these very mistakes.
If you're going to debate why this guy is/is not a success we can all make up our own little definitions and go on all day.
But he defined his goals in this PDF and it seems like he's reaching/making progress towards those goals.
How tall are you? I will literally skip a family vacation if I can't get a better seat on an airplane, to the point it's caused strain in my personal life.
I agree with your overall assessment that people will (usually) buy the cheapest thing, but I find it utterly bizarre a truly tall person wouldn't even care about being physically uncomfortable for hours on end. I'm curious if we just disagree on what "very tall" means, like 6' is not that tall.
I'm sure there's some disgruntled employee complaining somewhere, but I have not seen any legitimate complaints about him. All those "Mr Beast is a fraud!?!" videos have no substance, and are just people using his name for views.
I don’t catch any major celebrations of abusive tactics on HN, but then again I tend to be late to the comments and those posts are buried by the time I arrive.
That sounds like standard goal-oriented planning. Amazon starts with the product's press release. "The Amazon working backward method is a product development approach that starts with the team imagining the product is ready to ship. The product team’s first step is to draft a press release announcing the product’s availability. The audience for this press release is the product’s customer."
https://www.productplan.com/glossary/working-backward-amazon...
Off the top of my head, Gamers Nexus is a counterpoint. Obviously not Mr Beast-scale, but we're also looking at a huge difference in target demographic breadth.
Besides, is YouTube any worse in this regard than what came before it? Substance-free reality TV predates YouTube. For as long as cheap printing and mail services have been around, artists have had strong incentive to go design ads rather than pursue their art independently.
YouTube definitely has a race to the bottom going on, but it's not all-consuming and well-researched, high-quality material is still profitable for creators as long as you know how to play the thumbnail game.
"I Built 100 Houses And Gave Them Away!" 127M views, mentions Jamaica 45 seconds in: https://youtu.be/KkCXLABwHP0?si=3oMfNy0iAGVrTwqo&t=45
"I Built 100 Wells In Africa" 202M views, mentions Kenya 12 seconds in: https://youtu.be/mwKJfNYwvm8?si=qYc8jZWsYXwF1qrm&t=11
"We Powered a Village in Africa" 26M views (different channel), mentions Kenya 12 seconds in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FQvRZg3bcg
No, being unemployed is the coercive factor here. It's not fair to treat at-will employment as non-coercive unless non-employment is actually zero. Non-employment currently stands at about 7.7%: https://www.richmondfed.org/research/national_economy/non_em...
Why would anyone turn down a chance to make a living if a job is offered? Why do you think the fed ensures that there are never enough jobs for everyone? Why do you think the fed and the business world talks about the economy in terms of "jobs" and "unemployment" when these are metrics largely unrelated to stuff like "am I actually getting a fair wage" and "is housing priced anywhere near rationally"? etc—the non-coercive labor market is a complete illusion.
If your most potent defense of Mr. Beast is that he's made a lot of money, then he stands due the same scrutiny Rockefeller and Carnegie got. I've watched his videos, it's not an incorrect conclusion to say that his popularity hinges on the "savior complex" present in most of his videos. His content revolves around exploiting charity as a social phenomenon. He's a wannabe altruist that pockets more money than he donates. His business relies on the emotional manipulation of a destitute audience.
No they don't. When you are young and everything is new it seems that way, when you get older you realize it's all just nonsense for entertainment.
That's also why film critics seem to hate all films, except for the boring ones. They are looking for art, but it's not there.
If tomorrow Ford decided to start this process it would be a decade before the market believed that hey had changed their ways. Would they survive this gap? IDK the new ford Mach-E is not selling so I doubt it but I"m not an economist. People don't buy fords because of the reliability. They buy it because it's cheaper and the risk of downtime is less important to them than the price premium. Don't forget that in order to achieve that lost resource return you must be disciplined all the time and most people/corps cannot achieve that.
Even a little help in the mix of those 3 can be overlooked more than it ought to be.
Perfect really is the enemy of Great/Good.
Companies that have hammered out an effective cost/production/time ratio are not something you can compete with without becoming the same thing as them. Which is why factory managers are literally afraid to turn them off for any reason.
My brother constantly tells me about how when they do repairs they will see something within 1-3 months of failing and tell the factory manager. He said almost without exception they always ask will it increase the repair time "TODAY" and of course the answer is yes. They always decline and deal with it when it breaks at a greater time/cost. I think this is more an effect of the toxic work relationship that has become forced on everyone by MBA's.
2. > He's a wannabe altruist that pockets more money than he donates. That's such a weak case. So he doesn't donate everything therefore he's evil or something?
3. > His content revolves around exploiting charity as a social phenomenon. What are you even saying? I'm much more utilitarian about it. Is he doing more good than harm? The answer is a clear and resounding yes. Especially as the 'harm' is labeled: Entertaining kids, helping others and filming it, and making money?
I guess this politically correct posturing bothers me because most of the people issuing this criticism have not had as much impact in people's lives as he has. Classic case of armchair thinkers, criticizing people doing stuff, and doing so excellently.
At any rate the outrage seems like it would be better directed at Pfizer or other corporatocratic corruption machines, you know, people doing actual harm. Not a kid that figured out how to make money in a new media landscape and is using a huge portion of that to uplift his community.
and it was up against Yahoo! one of the most famously directionless bumbling tech companies, and their peers. Yahoo! didn't seem like it was executing on almost all cylinders with almost LASER focus on some goal, so why did it take 99%ilers working full tilt and an innovative idea (PageRank) and an innovative model (off-shelf Intel/Linux clusters instead of 'real' expensive server class hardware like Sun and mainframes) and Silicon Valley funding to beat them?
If you're not at a FAANG or similar, your coworkers are average, maybe disinterested, the processes and procedures seem almost designed to slow and frustrate progress, managers don't know much about the job and hate making decisions or taking risk; shouldn't it be possible to outdo half the companies which exist, and most of the companies which fail, by doing just slightly better work than average?
Where's that discrepancy coming from?
Mr. Beast is ultimately the star of the video, so he has to micromanage at some point or another. That's his brand. He can't let his employees plan a video that he won't like.
I did find the comments about all-nighters off-putting... And I personally don't like working on multiple things at the same time. But that's personal preference; I don't particularly like Mr. Beast's videos, so I don't see myself working for his company any time soon.
I'm more concerned about Mr. Beast overextending himself. With Mr. Beast (the person) being the brand and the star, I don't think he can scale himself much more.
The problem is when luggage costs the same or more as ticket without luggage.
Cause and effect requires observation, which means there will be a time delay between when a company does something shady and when the customers realize the rug was pulled out from under them. You can't know a pinto is going to blow up before it blows up. Once people realized, it almost destroyed the company [1]. The time delay between a correction in a company is even longer, because it requires another layer of observation.
None of these are proof that the error correction mechanism is broken, or that the quote is somehow untrue/fragile. Most of the egregious examples of broken feedback are those companies that make the red and blue politicians multi millionaires by the time they retire, usually with no-consequences government contracts.
edit: and, this fails miserably if you don't pay any attention to the end goal, which I've seen several times.
[1] https://www.autoweek.com/news/a2099001/ford-100-defective-pi...
I'll bet it wasn't. You're hearing this from the person who ran the company. Most companies have terrible code, and I'll bet the people running those companies would also say they were "engineering focused" and had "rock solid" code. They're just wrong.
Once I worked in a small software company, and the boss kept telling us "if the company grows, we will get more money, and we will all get rich". Young and naive, we worked hard. When the company grew, he... hired more developers. Well, of course. That is obviously much more profitable than increasing the salary of the existing developers. At the end, he was the only person who got rich. Why did we ever think it would end up differently? I guess, because we were young and naive, and also because he told us so.
Being older and more cynical, if you want me to get rich, pay me. (Or make me a partner in business.) Otherwise, five or ten years later, when the company gets big and I will probably be burned out, you will have no incentive to waste money on the burned out guy, when the alternative is to hire someone fresh.
Yes, everything in the movies/TV is derived from comic book. Comic books are extremely niche so movie content is new and novel to most movie viewers.
Multiverse / reboots / retcons also helped kill comic book popularity. It was a bad idea there as well! https://youtu.be/0PlwDbSYicM?si=iOlB2xYP8Cm1PwXc
> they've milked every bit of nostalgia you may have for their characters
No, it's not nostalgia. Marvel Film's greatest achievement is they took C and D tier characters and made them A tier. Iron Man was not super popular prior to the films. No one had even heard of Guardians of the Galaxy. Prior to the Marvel Cinematic Universe the most popular Marvel characters were Spider-Man and X-men. The film rights of whom had been previously sold to Sony and Fox.
In any case, I don't see how any of this makes them "shady". Not entertaining? Maybe. Shady? I honestly don't even know what that means in this context. Superhero movies strike me as extremely low on the scale of evil. Making mass market entertainment? Oh no the horror! /s
But if you can easily scale production capacity, you should not strive for 100% utilisation. You should expand capacity before you reach 100%, because if you are running at 100% you will not be able to take any more orders and lose the opportunity to grow your business.
One example is a disaster readiness organization which mandates that teams cannot deploy code in only a single datacenter. What they should really be doing is making it so code automatically runs in multiple datacenters.
Facilitate instead of forbid.
In the other aforementioned cases, in absence of an algorithm, revenue-generating activity wasn't as well correlated with meeting customer expectations. The point is that companies will always optimize for their own revenue, regardless of how well or poorly their activity meets customer expectations.
This is a solution oriented approach instead of a lazy ass covering approach which I think the GP was referring to. The job should be finding risks and then figuring out how to work around those risks. Very rarely are there no solutions, most of the time it is due to general laziness or in aptitude where someone can find risks but they do not find solutions.
PS: “It’s too expensive to save money with your methods!” Is the most common response I get from customers to this kind of efficiency improvement advice. Invariably they then proceed to set several million dollars on fire instead of spending ten thousand to avoid that error. It’s so predictable, it is getting boring.
It's pretty out of touch, exhausting and kinda makes me feel embarrassed for whoever posted it.
People think they are so high and mighty and have everything figured out. The fact is, they are just an average human trying to make it through this world like everyone else. Just like me, just like you. Nobody has it figured out.
And to go back onto topic, I thought the leaked PDF was fascinating. There is a lot of good management stuff in that document.
Toyota makes some of the cheapest and some of the most expensive cars on the market. They don't "use" their reputation to do this, their reputation is the result of excellent production.
You're missing the point with Ford, which is an example of another very successful manufacturer who uses similar techniques/philosophy as Toyota, which are not similar to what your brother's machine shop does.
When I didn't have status I just paid for it, but every seat having extra legroom isn't in and of itself enough to move the needle for me.
Define "professional letter". "Chicago manual of style" professional letter or some other, less professional styleguide? Because if it isn't written using the proper styleguide... I'm walking out that door before the first hour on the clock.
In this particular example, often this isn't remotely feasible, either from a business logic standpoint (I can think of plenty of fintech examples), lack of qualified DBA/sysadmins, network admins, cloud cost constraints, methods and controls to ensure to auditors that devs cannot access production data - none of this is trivial, and often to the dev it seems "silly" they may need to wait a few hours for something they could technically access in a few minutes, but acting like these solutions have no tradeoffs or are always worth doing suggests a lack of knowledge as to how these things actually work in a business and on a development team. It certainly isn't always laziness, and I'd even say it's not laziness that often at all.
That said I feel like having people who are constructively blunt in your organization can make all the difference. If you listen to stories about successful managers and CEOs it often comes down to bluntness.
It can also go the other way though. Being blunt while lacking in other areas (technical knowledge, judgment, vision, ethics) will just add toxicity.
While many try to make a living off YouTube (and some do) there are no guarantees offered nor should any be expected.
And I would say 99% of it is worse than the goofy YouTube stuff. Reality TV is mostly people hooking up and pretending to fall in love.
(The book is historical fiction)
> Like a bunch of grumpy old men, we don’t like new things here, the 90s were the peak of the internet and computing apparently.
I invite you to consider, based on your own wording, that you are doing more feeling than rationalizing. It is some work, and perhaps not completely possible, to do a comprehensive and correct meta analysis aiming to gauge the state of rational vs non-rational commentary on HN.
> bitter about AI, bitter about social media, bitter about the Saas model, bitter about Crypto, bitter about ads, bitter about privacy, bitter about capitalism, bitter about Elon Musk, bitter about every damn thing imaginable
The fact that the world is imperfect is not a reason to ignore that the world is imperfect. One must of course satisfy their Ego and make some peace with the world that is around them that it is in some sense "good", but the act of a rational mind, after it is done indulging the (necessary?) behaviors of the animal in which it resides, is to relentlessly nitpick, criticize, deconstruct the world around it, as far is it is possible, without feeling.
Yes, all those things suck, or have things that suck about them. If one of them is the field in which you work, you may even resent the criticism. And yet, it is only by acknowledging what is wrong that we can build and do what is (more) right.
Perhaps what I will say, is that if HN is supposed to be a place of technical innovation, it is undeniably true that it is no longer possible to easily innovate, anymore. And if that is true, then there should some discussion of all the ways that what has been built now constrains/no longer makes possible the alternatives. That is not something you can change with a "happy go lucky attitude" or renouncing a cynical one. In fact, one can argue that "can do no harm" attitude is what has brought about this venture. Perhaps a slower, more considered approach, would have resulted in a better outcome.
It is the opposite of idealism to see the world as it is. Pragmatism is rooted in acknowledging both the good and bad.
Idealism is ignoring the bad in the name of "pragmatism". Maybe you have to ignore it for your Public Relations metrics, but not for your executive or engineering perspective(s).
Cram it. You can say the same thing about Pfizer, anyone criticizing a dictator, or terrible philosophers trying to publish self help books for profit. By that logic, you're not qualified to defend Mr. Beast either because you don't actually understand the causal relationship between success and charity. It's nonsense criticism, a thought-terminating argument intended to obviate good-faith discussion.
Mr. Beast's problem is obvious, if you're willing to look past his marketing. Because at the end of the day, he's a business. He uses the same playbook as the most abusive monopolies like Apple and Google, laundering his reputation as a healthy net positive on society. Scratching beneath the surface, people know that he lied about how much money he makes, he lied about the cars he drives and the house he lives in, and probably lies to his employees to prevent them from presenting serious competition. Assuming Mr. Beast is, well, smart, assigning him as a happy-go-lucky charity cause is exactly the sort of outcome he wants. If he was serious about charity or altruism, he'd have some grander plan than sponsoring game shows and leeching off his popularity for profit.
By sincerely believing the image he presents, you yourself have been manipulated into thinking he's inert. Give him... I dunno, 3 more months? I've forgotten the average half-life of lifestyle influencers being ousted as racketeers or groomers on YouTube.
Would you say a man that spends 40 years working 60 hours a week, alienating all friends and neighbors til he has no friends or anyone that respects him, no kids, no partner, and a group on ex employees that hate him for squeezing them to work under market value? Is he a success just because he accumulated 3x the capital he set out to when he started his business at 20 years old? Then dies suddenly alone, only for everyone that met him to chuckle and move on with their day?
Would that be a success by most people's standards? Does it even matter if it's a success by one person's standards? Are the school shooters a success because they accomplish their goals before death?
I love coming on here and seeing the world's wealthiest and savviest tech magnates breathlessly murmuring in awe amongst themselves about such unprecedented tidbits of genius business acumen as "only hire good workers; don't hire bad workers"
Is it? I know one former employee who is currently in open conflict appears to think so, but they're also a single potentially biased source. Beyond that, has there been any specific information about the culture inside? This document hardly reads as "extreme almost culty" to me.
It's very interesting that the phenomenon itself is multi-cultural, though. Or maybe it's internet-cultural? It's probably tied into the nature of human beings and people exploiting that.
Depends on your era. The 90's gave us Beavis and Butthead, Southpark, Ren & Stimpy and the Power Rangers. It gave us XTREME!!! everything. It gave us Mortal Kombat and AOL. There was a lot of parental concern about the stuff the "kids these days" were consuming.
The 80's gave us Transformers or Voltron. It gave us MTV and the rise of Nickelodeon. It gave us GI Joe cartoons, He-Man, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and an endless supply of toys imported from japan and accompanied by 30 minute commercials for those toys (see also Transformers, Voltron, He-Man etc). There was a lot of parental concern about the stuff the "kids these days" were consuming, heck they got the federal government involved they were so concerned.
Bugs Bunny and Looney Tunes had people concerned for its mindless violence and effect on kids. Remember that Mr. Rogers started his show (and pitched continued funding for PBS to congress) on the concerns that TV was just mindless dreck rotting children's brains.
Start going much earlier than that and the ability of entertainment to be just broadcast into your life and home reduces considerably, but I imagine parents in the 1800's also had plenty of concerns about various mindless entertainment drivel that was luring their children off the godly paths.
I wouldn't wish "obsession" on anyone. It is extremely unpleasant and harmful to experience. Willingly giving your life to a company is not obsession, it's a choice.
If you accept a job that’s your market value. If you think you’re worth more, get a higher paying job. Or don’t and pretend that you were squeezed into working for under market value.
The guy employed people for 40 years. Not the worst thing in the world.
Not everybody values the same stuff. Some people like what other people call work. Some people don’t need friends.
> Is he a success just because he accumulated 3x the capital he set out to when he started his business at 20 years old?
If at 20 years old he said his goal was to accumulate 3x the capital before he dies, then I couldn’t argue that by his definition of success, he succeeded.
Hopefully he doesn’t care if I think he’s a success.
> Then dies suddenly alone
We all die suddenly and alone. We’re alive and then we’re dead. Nobody comes with us.
> Would that be a success by most people's standards?
Who cares what most people think?
Also, how would you apply your logic to the school shooter question?
I think it matters a lot. It creates massive distortions in society's perception of value.
Because of YouTube's advertising, you have people becoming multimillionaires by making total nonsense videos where they do things like react to other videos. Literally a YouTube video of a guy watching other YouTube videos, pausing and saying whatever pops into his head. Like this comment section. And he gets millions of dollars for it.
There's something deeply wrong with a society where you are rewarded for nothing. The people who actually do something tend to feel cheated when they see it happen. Imagine being a professional, a trades person and seeing a random dude get 1000x richer than you because he said stupid shit on the internet. And if you point it out, some startup founder accuses you of sour grapes.
Society should think deeply about the incentives it offers to people. Because people will respond to them.
The 2nd edition box set was about ~£35 in 1993, adjusted for inflation that would be ~£73 now - which then when converted into CAD is well...alot more than what I just paid for 10th edition (about $80 CAD+tax). So - it's a good deal - and I am sure that there is overlap amongst friends during edition changeover.
5-year cycle would be a happy medium, but "that's just like my opinion man"...
I honestly don't know what you mean here, I hope you can clarify.
I extend the same criticisms towards traditional television as well.
They're both just symptoms of the advertising problem. Advertisers are the enablers of this stuff. They'll back any content that draws attention, and the ones which draw the most are memes, controversy, generally negative value slop. People endlessly scrolling apps with infinite content being fed instant gratification with product offerings in between. Algorithms that actively push them towards controversy and hate because it maximizes "engagement".
We hate ourselves and have nothing better to do?
> Also, how would you apply your logic to the school shooter question?
I wouldn’t pat yourself on the back quite so hard for finding this attempt at a clever gotcha. I thought by ignoring it you’d get the message that it wasn’t as good as you thought it was.
But nevertheless, I would say that they were successful in reaching their goals but that I find their goals and actions abhorrent. I don’t feel the need to add that final qualification to MrBeast’s goals and actions.
Where was this provided? I didn't see you or any poster provide claim or evidence that Toyota or Ford intentionally leave unused production capacity. I had a busy day so I may have missed it somewhere.
Far as I'm aware they also run their assembly as close to 99.999% of the time as possible.
My brother is not a mft. He works for an engineering company that makes and maintains manufacturing equipment. He has worked in nearly every major company you can name's manufacturing plants fixing their stuff or installing new stuff. Its a whole world I did not know about until he started. I'm just forwarding some stories he tells. Not sure why you think you know more than all the people involved.
Every single video they make is a hit.
In this hypothetical situation, I would be impressed that this organization is able to deliver such consistent product. I would be curious about what they do or say operationally that enables that.
At the end of the podcast the filmcast, they say "at the end of the day, it is really impressive that _ made a movie." (They name the director)
This is true if the director has made dozens of movies or one. It's always impressive. Doing things in the real world is hard.
Do you find anything in this hypothetical situation agreeable? Or is it only hard when someone you like does it?
There are lots of startups in SV looking for "cracked engineers" and frankly this sounds a bit like that!
If you want, I will though: in the document, Jimmy says he wants to create the biggest YouTube channel. By that metric (his own!) he has succeeded.
That doesn't really challenge the proposal about regulating content.
(I personally recoil at the proposition of China-like content moderation but whatever.)
Name a company which has prospered, over many years, without rendering benefit to its customers.
I just found it odd that you went through and systematically addressed every section of my post, but that one.
It was taking what in my opinion is a lame point of view, to an extreme, in hopes of helping someone see that it fails at the extremes... Thus maybe you'll think about it and agree with me that in reality someone's own goals and views of themselves don't matter that much because as a whole we as a society have views on what makes a life worth living and what adds value to society.
And yes I think MrBeast systemizing making mindless brain numbing stupid videos for teenagers and kids to be pretty bad for society. I don't care that be produces revenue doing so.
Yes, that is also sad.
The Biden administration is basically the first one to take these violations of antitrust law seriously since Carter.
Again, more overwrought language. People are doing this out of their own free will, and benefiting substantially from it. If you truly care about people being exploited in uneven financial situations, you would do well to put all your effort towards enacting a higher minimum wage, removing part-time and contractor classification for all low-paying jobs, etc. Because complaining about fun YouTube videos paying people six figures for not all that much time ain't it. And if you really think that people who don't have lots of money can never consent to doing anything, well god isn't that a paternalistic approach that infantilizes adults.
People are losing communities, people are losing attention span, and this is because we make people addict to shit like this
And then idiot like Trump manage to take power
We need a society with longer pauses, reflexion, empathy
That's not a value judgement on my part, just a conclusion from decades of declining union membership, with no correlating uptick in starvation or massive reduction in wages.
(You may argue for wage stagnation, and you may attribute that to declining unionism, but that is not a collapse in wages!)
You can't strip out the valuable content from a sentence and then claim it was always identical to valueless sentences.
Inevitable.
(Although this document clearly sets out that this distinction should be fought at every step, so that counts against what I'm saying. It is trying desperately to ensure the company reflects the man as much as possible)
No one is forced to work there and they are not taken advantage of.
Any of them are free to start their own channel and outcompete him! It's literally how he did it!
“Net bad” means the world would be absolutely and inarguably better without YouTube. This is so outlandish, honestly; YouTube at its core is an information sharing platform and a lot of useful things have come out of it. Immense amounts even.
We come into this world naked, defenseless, starving and freezing. Other animals are able to defend themselves or at least flee, often only minutes after being born or hatching. It takes literal months for us to learn to meaningfully move on our own, about a year to feed ourselves and many more years to be able to pose a meaningful threat to natural predators or forage for food on our own. Throughout this entire time we not only need to be nurtured by our parents, we need an entire society to sustain us and our caregivers.
This is a common misunderstanding of our evolution: it's not simply our brains that gave us an edge over the rest of the animal kingdom, it's our cooperation. Large brains are a natural consequence of complex social interactions and feed back into them. It's not just the ability to make and use tools that set us apart, it's our ability to teach each other about them and learn from each other.
It didn't take a great individual inventor, it took a tribe full of people to carry on each invention and pass the knowledge to the next generation while sustaining the tribe to allow the inventors to invent new technology or improve upon old ones for the benefit of the entire tribe. We're not standing on the shoulders of giants, we're standing on a human pyramid of all who came before us and everyone around us helping to perpetuate humanity.
I'm a long time reader, but only recently registered to post. I think this statement is quite illuminating to illustrate the point of the person you're responding to.
I actually didn't know HN existed until a colleague told me about it as a place to find a bit more optimism about technology than has become the norm on places like reddit. The overwhelming vibe on reddit is that capitalism bad, big tech bad, AI bad, etc. And I have definitely noticed this a lot more on HN in the last few years than when I first started reading.
I don't know why, and obviously it is just my anecdotal opinion, but it is how I feel, and I have seen many posters who feel the same.
Obviously we should all be open to different views, but sometimes I just want a little haven where I can read about technology and cool stuff alongside people who are mostly optimistic about that stuff, without having to be swamped by "end state capitalism" sentiment, like everywhere else. That's just what I want, I'm not making any moral judgement on what others want.
That was my point.
My point wasn't that lawyers/security/IT/whatever shouldn't do their job. It's that their perspective should be focused on helping the company achieve whatever it's trying to do.
well there's the craftsman argument and then there's the broken windows argument.
the craftsman one if obvious: if you're in a devops/IT role and your job is to manage salesforce, then you should have some input in it as it'll affect you efficiency (aka the profitability of your company). A salesman shouldn't be buying tools for the carpenter without the carpenter's input.
the windoww argument is a bit more superficial but still a factor to consider. I may not be working on mainaining saleforce, but I will need to interface with it for logstics purposes. if it's so inefficient that it becomes a chore to track hours or update documentation or etc. it's going to leave a bunch of broken windows. You can still operate with a broken window, but that part of the building will be a place to avoid. You may even try to work around the CRM wherever possible. Which seems to lose the point of a CRM
>And even if we want the nice things, we may not actually be able to afford them.
Sure hope that wasn't the case. If they can't afford a proper tool for employees (which is maybe a few tens of thousands a year at worst. a fraction of an employee) how are they going to afford me?
I'm sure it's just penny pinching, but I sure hope a boss never says outright "we can't afford this tool" without very good reason.
1. that's a pretty horrible interpretation for an engineer to have. Though I feel "code" and "codebases" are different topics to consider. There will always be some bad code as long as multiple people work on a codebase (because you're simply not going to have a principle programmer stuck doing minor bug fixes). I argue most truly bad codebases fail early (or become bad later, when being a "good codebase" is no longer a selling point for them, and as people shuffle in and out).
2. even if it's true that most companies have tereible codebases, I argue good codebases with no traction is worse than bad codebases with traction. Ideally we have good code with traction, but this example shows that even multimillion dollar companies will be sold on promises rather than proper features.
The devs... man, it's a constant battle. And their dev tool quality is all over the place. It's no wonder they lost the desktop market, and only swing in app devs due to market dominance.
low quality consumption doesn't have an age range. Sometimes you just want to watch a cozy cat video, so I get it.
>We need something like china where algorithms push quality educational content.
that sounds horrible for multiple reasons that could be a post in and of itself. I'll just point out the obvious one from the post itself:
>Your goal here is to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible.
If the algorithm shifts, they will shift and I'm sure something goodhearted like "make the best educational videos" will find some loophole to slip in clickbait or any other engagement metric.
Ultimately, let me curate my own filters. I can't save everyone else but let me make sure I never see that stuff if I don' want to.
On a less subjectve level, I feel the "Embrace, extend, extinguish" mentality runs counter to this ideal. the FAANGs did indeed render benefit to its customers early on. You can argue by now almost all of them 20 years later have long shifted towards being gatekeepers that employ dark patterns or outright rent seek these days, rather than acting like a customer-focused company.
Of course, I'm describing a literal forum here (physical forums! good times). I wonder how many whistleblowers out there highlighted some dark pattern in the past 20 years and were cast off as a conspiracy nut. Both publicly and in internal company channels.
nit2: it's so strange how times have changed. 40-50 years ago his Pinto recall was company ending. Nowadays the Cybertruck has had what? 5 recalls now? And it still has this bizarre cult behind it. What happened to people? what happened to wanting a driveable car (nevermind those truck minded audiences the cybertruck targets who claims to do more than just drive)?
This is the kind of mentality that got us all with anxiety crisis and panic attacks depending on medications.
>I am willing to bet he knows his metrics better than >95% of startup founders.
Id bet so too. Becuase he's definitely rich enough even pre-youtbe to just find a YT contact and ask about the metrics, on top of studying his market. Very few startups get such objective data.
> Hiring only A-players. Bloated teams kill startups.
It really depends on your stage of scale. You don't need 100 A-players once you start expanding the app. And it benefits to train younger workers on your systems as your older ones start to move on, retire, or die.
But those are not only societally looked down upon but illegal is most US states. Your success here also lies on the ability to operate discreetly out of the eyes of the law. Would that be a success? (even if I personally believe they should be legal).
Maybe we should integrate that social value into "success" more often. Facebook was probably the most successful company, so successful laws are being made to reel their patterns in. It wasn't illegal before though, so success?
Can I really say a company lobbying for worse people/worker/world conditions to be a "success"? The cigarette metaphor is apt here. if you wanna go more extreme, children in mines would be the best success; employees who can't talk back, can be paid peanuts, and are easily replacable is peak success.
Oh, yeah I get what you’re saying now. Give in to peer pressure!
as the most extreme example; we paid too high a blood cost that shall hpefully never be repeated in civilization again with the Holocaust. But some of the findings in those experiments to have value (I know many of the experiments and findings are worthless from a medical sense). I don't blame anyone at all that takes a moral stance to burn such data in order to discourage any backroom experiments from trying to repeat this, but some of that knowledge was used to save lives.
>The real question for such an ethics-free look at a business is whether the unethical bits of a business can be really disentangled from the interesting bits in a meaningful way. That is very often not the case.
I believe it can. a lot of the advice I read here is just good business sense.
>Your goal here is to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible. That’s the number one goal of this production company. It’s not to make the best produced videos. Not to make the funniest videos. Not to make the best looking videos. Not the highest quality videos.. It’s to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible.
This sucks to hear as an enthusiast focused on research, but this is honestly just talking about scoping and focusing your goal. very common business sense. But your goal hopefully isn't to shovel out slop with clickbait thumbnails that maximizes engagement.
> This is what dictates what we do for videos... If a viewer feels their expectations are not being matched, they’ll click away - driving down the crucial Average View Duration that informs how much the video is promoted by YouTube’s all-important mystical algorithms.
This is about making an engaging hook. Again, good business sense you'll hear launching any product.
This is definitely for clickbait (and the interpretation here focusing on AVD over quality can be scrutinized), but you can balance this and make a good hook without outright lying.
>An example of the “wow factor” would be our 100 days in the circle video.... we bring it in on a crane 30 seconds into the video. Why? Because who the fuck else on Youtube can do that lol.
crude language, but they understand the competition, and what they can and can't do. Ideally the lesson you get here isn't to just "outspend your competition", but that you need to understand your strengths and highlight them. Mr. Beast mindhacked the algorithms early on and uses those funds to do stuff others don't have the Net Worth to even attempt.
etc. It's possible, as long as you keep a moral compass in mind while understanding the undertones of the advise.
2. ethics is not some ettiquite decided in a business room. they are formed by society. It was probably never ethical to let kids work in coal mines, but as long as it wasn't illegal (and can take the PR hit) some businesses would just do it.
are we really that far off these days, in this economy?
I guess to me the crass eyeball-harvesting of MrBeast seems like exploitation of everyone involved with the only meaningfulness involved being profit. But I realize based on stickfigure's response that different people find different things meaningful, fair enough. Which is different than saying "just getting lots of money is meaningful for me" -- that is a different axis than meaning, and I'm unlikely to be swayed otherwise, although some people don't need meaning they just need money. It was hard for to imagine anyone is doing it for anything but the money at MrBeast, but different people are different and some of them are hard for me to imagine, fair!
However, I think we can recognize a collective we that even if the individual might not do a thing ... we're all in the same boat in the end.
Just don't be naive and think that societal standards don't exist. And also, possibly give some thought as to why they exist so that you don't go down insane spirals and waste your life only to later understand that the collective had a point.
If you love what you do you'll never work a day in your life. If I wasn't employed as a software dev then I would still be writing code on a daily basis.
MrBeast has always been clear that his goal is to make the best videos in the world. Not to be the most nurturing place to work, or the most philanthropically minded. This document makes that clear. It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that in becoming the best in the world at youtube, he's had to become an extremely toxic individual.
Even if you want to take this sort of Machiavellian approach (if that's the right sort of description), it still isn't the employee's real goal. A person's goal is to make consistent money. That is a combination of not getting fired and working towards raises. If someone owns a significant share of company stock (significant in terms of their own wealth, not in relation to the company's total shares), then it will also include increasing stock price, but even that is only short term until they can diversify.
So if you have a KPI that is actually hurting the business to achieve, but hurts your career to not achieve it, then the right approach is to maximize achieving that KPI, assuming you have no input on the KPI. If you do have input, it involves a much more complex question of how does it impact your career to try to correct the KPI.
Admitting this openly is not recommended and is comparable to the company admitting openly what its real goal is (or the executives admitting openly what their goals are, which following the above logic, is not the same as what the company's goals are). This does get into a interesting idea of a company having a true goal that doesn't match the true goals of any single member of the company, which has some interesting implications.
No argument here.
Other things I could mention: multi-level marketing, snake oil sellers e.g. homeopathy astrology etc.
It’s just mindset and maintaining it.
In our 20s we might not know better, follow others and end up letting the current take us where it may.
Sometimes when I meet an 18 year old I wonder how they are having experiences where they are growing or the rate of growing is slowing much quicker than someone who was on the early internet.
If you can stay young and build discipline in all ages it works as you are saying.
It’s less about being the adult in the room as much as supporting people to grow and become those people they are seeking.
I'm saying you should examine why people set the standards they do and check if you agree with those values.
If you want to say "hell be with it, I'll be scum til I die because it makes me feel good" then more power to you. But don't go around saying you're successful. You're a rebel and a loser by most people's standards. Not by all. Even school shooters are respected by SOME for their bravery and determination.
I read the PDF; profit wasn't on the list of KPIs. In fact there was quite a lot of invective against it; he'll kill expensive projects just because he didn't think the quality was good enough. Of course $$ is related, but the focus really is on the eyeballs.
I worked in porn for a while. I found the work fun and meaningful. Not every mission involves saving the world.
I mean, this is evident in posts by one of "model" founders, Paul Graham. Many of his posts are about how most are doing things wrong, only framed in a positive way (for success, do this instead of the usual things you've been doing).
So perhaps you came in attracted by one side, but stuck around for the arguments, even if unconsciously ;)
What are the ethical considerations here?
The opening reply that kickstarted this particular thread was:
> You could say that about literally any shady business
But that user never bothered to qualify what exactly they consider to be "shady" about Mr. Beast's business.
Other than the fact that he has a hugely successful YouTube channel, I know next to nothing about him. I don't watch his content. From what I gather it is mass appeal entertainment.
I've read in some of the replies that he does philanthropic content and there are some un-cited claims that he "pockets" donations (that would be shady if true, but again - those claims were void of any links that would give them credibility).
Others seem to package-deal him in with all of YouTube creators, and they will cite shitty things that other content creators have done for clout as if Mr. Beast himself (or his company) did those things.
Most of the postings here seem to hate him for being successful at creating YouTube content that they personally don't like.
If you want to convince me that a YouTube channel is unethical, then point me towards the victims. Show me who he is hurting and make a clear case for how he is directly responsible for hurting them.
Yes, the context matters a lot. One of the frustrations with this conversation (and this is a thing that happens sometimes and doesn't other times - I don't mean to say this is always a problem on hn) is that we aren't able to discuss the thing because we have to spend the right number of tokens acknowledging globally recognized facts.
I want there to be one comment at the top level saying: hey just in case you're not aware, here's context that you need to know when evaluating a document by Foo.
And then I want the rest of us to be able to discuss it with the understanding that we all have that context.
1. Windshield wiper motor failure.
2. Loose trim from the bed.
3. Accelerator pedal can stick.
4. Wrong sized font used for the warning lights.
Wiper was fixed with OTA update. Accelerator pedal was fixed on all trucks within the first week after it was discovered.
> And it still has this bizarre cult behind it.
That doesn't mean sales haven't been hurt, but anyone actually interested will see that the above list isn't an issue. Toyota had a similar recall some years ago, and it hurt their sales too [3]. It's a good idea to skip first model years of any car.
[1] https://www.cars.com/research/tesla-cybertruck/recalls/
[3] https://www.npr.org/2010/02/02/123283959/gas-pedal-woes-put-...
#1 is a big issue but not for my area.
The let "let boys be childish" part and the overall psuedo-human tone kind of alarmed me. The random "hahas" littered around, seemed like a robot trying to be a human.
> micromanaging
He has a playbook/formula that works and all employees are solely focused on executing that vision. People have little operational ownership. In other words, employees don't have freedom in vision.
I even said it probably is necessary for the success of his business that employees don't have that freedom. I just would not enjoy working in a environment like that and I think employees (especially early ones) need to have that kind of operational freedom in startups (which is the context of my comment).
In bigger companies, it's a zero sum game. They don't really care about you because their scale makes it hard to identify who cares for them, so everything is just a business transaction.
Because it has worked, countless times. Microsoft, Google, Facebook etc were all small software companies once, the current hotness is NVIDIA (ok hardware, not software). Obviously it doesn't happen often, or to a high percentage of startups, but hey, he wasn't lying to you, you took the job knowing the deal.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: it looks like we've been having to ask you to stop breaking the site guidelines for years:
>>39281820 (Feb 2024)
>>35656288 (April 2023)
>>34844518 (Feb 2023)
>>18585046 (Dec 2018)
>>18575831 (Dec 2018)
Continuing like this is eventually going to get your account banned. I don't want to ban you, so if you'd please review the rules and stick to them, that would be good.
Other's would know more than me, I'm just an anecdote.
All I can say is that I find many responses to be Pavlovian, not well thought out, overly negative or cynical, and in my humble opinion just part of a low effort zeitgeist against capitalism.
If not and any criticism or even-surface-level inspection of how a question or statement is made, wouldn’t it be best to codify the “Yes, and…” improv rule (1) into your link (2)?
> You’re talking about formal science. Therapy and much of the things that take place in psychology aren’t formal.
It's not formal. It's the most common definition.
knowledge or a system of knowledge covering general truths or the operation of general laws especially as obtained and tested through scientific method
Look, if you can't actually use your theory to predict with any modicum of success, it's not science, it's philosophy. Which isn't bad per se, but it shouldn't be used for any real life application.
If you are familiar with psychology, then you are aware of the damage Freud ""theories"" that showed to be extremely unreliable. To me, that's the real danger of mixing philosophy with science. People confuse what they think is correct with reality.
According to Aristotelian Philosophy, there are only four elements and you can't disprove it. It's all the 5th element playing tricks on you.
> I can read between the lines but choose not to.
If you aren't ready to read it with a critical eye, then you'll fall for the PR in it. The point of the newcomer guidebook is to sell new guys on the benefits of organization, and push away people who don't fit that mold.
> “concentration camp” and torture
That's the extreme point of your statement. And you confirmed it. To me, that crosses several ethic and formalism bridges.
Even if it wasn't utterly immoral to do that test, it wouldn't give you any usable knowledge because of confounding factors.
> comparisons to rape
I made an offhand remark, that it's quite literally the anti-anti-rape slogan. And I discarded that, so why are you still going about it?
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.
There's many many definitions going along the gradient of formality from informal to formal. The science you're referring to is more on the formal end where there's data gathering that's written down, a hypothesis is made and what not. Additionally we tend to use statistics to numerically quantify the information.
At the most informal end, data is simply gathered through observation, a hypothesis is made intuitively. We still did science in the sense that it's possibly still valid. Do you need formal science to prove there's ground beneath your feet before you jump off your bed?
>Look, if you can't actually use your theory to predict with any modicum of success, it's not science, it's philosophy. Which isn't bad per se, but it shouldn't be used for any real life application.
science in it's most technical form can only falsify a hypothesis. When a theory is successful it means science only failed to falsify that hypothesis.
Philosophy as a whole is a bunch of BS. It's a bunch of conjecture that they try to formalize stuff that can be formalized and made up stuff that can never really be formalized. It's a mishmash of everything and is therefore nothing. You have the philosophy of science which is good by itself, but when you have something like the philosophy of morality side by side with the philosophy of science and Logic as if these things are equal... it becomes pure BS.
>If you are familiar with psychology, then you are aware of the damage Freud ""theories"" that showed to be extremely unreliable. To me, that's the real danger of mixing philosophy with science. People confuse what they think is correct with reality.
Freud made up his theories and verified it with his limited anecdotal data. It's much faster and is sometimes right. Formal Science is much more accurate but is slow.
>If you aren't ready to read it with a critical eye, then you'll fall for the PR in it. The point of the newcomer guidebook is to sell new guys on the benefits of organization, and push away people who don't fit that mold.
Doesn't mean what you said is even remotely true. Like freud this type of prediction needs a bit more "formality" to back up what you said.
>That's the extreme point of your statement. And you confirmed it. To me, that crosses several ethic and formalism bridges.
Not even close. In it's most extreme form people go to jail. This is far from that and uncalled for.
>Even if it wasn't utterly immoral to do that test, it wouldn't give you any usable knowledge because of confounding factors.
No it gives you knowledge of the test and what happens in the presence of confounding factors. It also indicates the possibility that the same results could happen without the confounding factors.
>I made an offhand remark, that it's quite literally the anti-anti-rape slogan. And I discarded that, so why are you still going about it?
Because it's extreme and unnecessary language that increases the hostility of the conversation and the accusation. I'm telling you that your response is over the top.
Mods on HN are people, and there's one person who posts publicly and responds to emails (dang). Moderator comments are not automated AFAICT, though they do lean heavily on standard language for all manner of self-evident reasons.
Mods also tend to get overwhelmed with busy threads and we've had a few particularly contentious ones in the past couple of days (middle-east conflicts).
Most HN moderation overall is accomplished through member votes and flags, and some automated tools to up- or down-rank submissions and automatically flag or kill submissions. There are a number of other factors at play, including the flamewar detector (<>>40437018 >, generally, posts with more comments than votes), and banned sites / userIDs. But none of those result in moderator comments to the thread.
If you have further questions, email mods with your concerns at hn@ycombinator.com. They're quite patient in explanations, which is how I know much of what I'm saying here, along with reading dang's mod comments, as I did when I found this thread.
However, it makes me sad that we as a society even let what he does (a zero-net as many pointed out) be a path to wealth on the first place. The fact that we reward so much something that is so void of value is our fault and IMHO what needs to be corrected somehow. It's sad to think we throw so much money at people covered by ketchup, but many PhD's barely make any money and we cannot figure out how to make open-source sustainable.
If our reward schemes were more aligned with actually providing value to society, this guy might have applied his intelligence and amassed his wealth doing something more worthwhile for everybody.
How do you know they are unqualified?
Mr Beasts YouTube videos make significant amounts of ad revenue. Some of that money goes to YouTube. But there is nothing wrong with having most of that money go to the creator of the videos.
You can apply this logic to other forms of entertainment too. You can say LeBron James or Michael Jordan just play basketball. But their basketball games generated enormous ad revenue. Shouldn’t a sizable chunk of that go to them and other NBA players that play the game?
Same logic for late night show comedians, all other big entertainment YouTube channels, tv stars, movie stars, movie directors, podcasters like Joe Rogan and so on.
All of these have a thing in common. They release content in some media like traditional tv or newer media like YouTube and they are primarily supported by advertising in their content and through merchandise sales.
I think it’s actually more moral for these people to be making lots of money than otherwise. Because otherwise the money generated by their content just goes to YouTube executives or tv executives or Spotify executives or some other corporate big wigs.
If ANY entertainment makes a ton of money shouldn’t the money go to the ones who create it?
In tv and movies, the Writer’s Guild and the Directors Guild routinely go on strikes for this issue.
Also I think it’s great George Lucas made billions of dollars on Star Wars. Many adults in the 1970’s thought Star Wars was junk for the mind…
I think his personal involvement in any given project is already quite limited. He’s created a huge, soulless machine that churns out videos for the sole purpose of achieving some YouTube high score, and he just pokes his nose in here and there to be the face of the operation and ensure it remains well-oiled.
Edit: that ”just” is obviously doing a ton of lifting because it’s likely still a huge amount of work on his part, but my point is that it’s not like he lovingly crafts all these clips by himself.
Then you come crying to us when things aren't updated or servers get breached. Also, for DNS/Website blocks it is often management that decides but a baseline of malware/p0rn blocking is good. Besides, account in general are not admin any more in the enterprise. Just how it is :)
Cyberinsurance is a bigger and bigger deal now.
Your daily driver account should not be local admin.
Yes, we need MS Defender/S1/Crowdstrike for EDR, DNS blocking and Mandatory updates etc for security which now is actual money with cyberinsurance that won't pay unless we fulfil certain criteria. This all requires computers to be managed by an MDM.
Take it up with teh bossman.
In an emergency situation you single out random person precisely because there are no set processes who should be doing that, so you create responsibility impromptu.
In any half-functional organization work item with a deadline accepted by someone means THEY take responsibility to deliver in time and communicate any blockers. Having to constantly prod counterparty in another team signals totally broken and/or inexistent project management. It fits a lean startup where everyone is responsible for everything and everything is a fire you distinguish right there and move on. It does not fit organization where exponential growth of communication channels means communication becomes the bottleneck.
I argue that in many cases owners and managers, those who are posed to benefit from this ideology, are the ones which poison the mindset by punishing proactivity and being arrogant. There's also D employees, those that are unable to create value by the conditions set forth, they recognize the pointleness of their job and actively do the minimum and create excuses just to not get fired.
That's what the document was about though. The audience of the document is quite clearly people who will be given the responsibility to deliver a video or product. It's quite literally communicating to them the exact concept you're pointing out here, that you need to establish clear roles and responsibilities. And what's being conveyed is that there isn't a single "one size fits all" responsibility chain. You can't just throw a request over the wall and assume and hope someone on the other side of that wall will come through for you. Most of this document is quite clearly "project management 101". If you're hiring people for a business that is largely centered around having multiple one shot projects in flight at any given time, "project management 101" is exactly the sort of document you want to be handing to new hires. It might be obvious to you, but spend time in any large organization and you quickly come across people for whom taking ownership and responsibility for something and what that entails isn't obvious. Heck I see this on software development teams all the time, where PR requests get thrown "over the wall" at the whole team and the turn around time is delayed as people assume someone else will get to it before they will and forget about it. Most teams I've worked on eventually land on some sort of interrupt or direct assignment system for PRs for exactly this reason, because you need to assign clear responsibility in order to get results turned around faster.
Do you think you are happier in life when you at the top? I tell you a secret, no.
Its for sure better to not stress about stuff like money but your definition of success is not universal.
There's some severe information bias here. If you actually believe this, then you're basically restricted from buying most vehicles. Toyota is out [1] along with, BMW [2], Ford [3], Chevy [4], Honda [5], Volvo [6], Mercedes [7] and more. The cars affected in those are similar to orders of magnitude more. These were all first results, one vehicle, but I'm sure there are many more examples for each.
The odd tribalism is what I find most interesting about the Cybertruck. And no, I'm not interested in buying a Cybertruck.
[1] https://www.cars.com/articles/toyota-recalls-2-3-million-veh...
[2] https://repairpal.com/recall/04V409000
[3] https://repairpal.com/recall/99V265000
[4] https://www.asburyauto.com/gmc-accelerator-pedal-recall
[5] https://www.asburyauto.com/honda-accelerator-pedal-recall
[6] https://www.motorsafety.org/volvo-recalls-xc40-bev-suvs-that....
[7] https://www.panish.law/2012/08/stuck-gas-pedal-risk-prompts-...
But I was talking more about models, not "all teslas are banned". If they can improve on these issues in next year's model, then that's something to be encouraged, not dropped altogether over one fixable issue.
>The odd tribalism is what I find most interesting about the Cybertruck.
I don't particularly care about any car enough to attack/defend it. But A bad pedal is a bad pedal, and I'm lucky if I get more than one time to learn that lesson in person. Of course I'm going to be wary if a recall this serious occurs.
This should be an executive handbook, maybe some trickled to employees knowing if they go above and beyond they’ll get further but there’s a very good reasons founders shouldn’t doodle their personal feelings into a handbook and it’s cost him big.
What we are seeing here is the result of a person that stayed as a startup mentality when it was time to grow into a corporate one. He will survive this I’m sure, but it’s going to cost him a billion dollars and we will start to see a much more grown up version. I hope founders are paying attention to how and why this happened.
I only do that in cases where it's appropriate (e.g. where both people were breaking the site guidelines to approximately the same degree), but in such cases it's convenient because it cuts out the "why me? what about the other person?" complaints which otherwise tend to be common.