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 fact that a shady business used some tactics to advance its cause doesn't automatically condemns the means.
Which is always bad.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Are Marvel films shady for being popular? Is HN shady for adding features which increase engagement?
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 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
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
Instead look at reddit is desperately trying (inline ads, chat, avatars, forcing app use)
By de facto, you never ignore ethics. You may disregard them, but they're never ignored.
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.
Name any ethical company and I'm sure there will be questionable actions they did in past with "due to the market conditions" excuse.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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."
That's not my department, " says Wernher von Braun.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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?
> Can you point to the parts of the document, or other resources about Mr. Beast,
> that warrant a comparison with tobacco companies?
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.
It is almost certainly not generalizable advice for achieving “success” in the cooperative game of life on earth.
We share a planet with nearly 10 billion other people. Money isn't everything.
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 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-...
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.
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)
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.
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.
- 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).
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.
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.
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.
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
(The book is historical fiction)
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"...
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.
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.
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.
That was my point.
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.
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?
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.