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).
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.
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 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.”
This guy has a genuine love of torturing people
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
YouTube is 99% junk and just because 1% of it is decent, that doesn’t make up for the 99%.
As one of many examples, the ww2 channel is quite different but also financially successful: https://www.youtube.com/@WorldWarTwo
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.
Those creators are still making orders of magnitude less money than people who make zero content attention grabbing controversy meme slop videos.
oh really did you try searching because I found one in about two seconds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1qXIkr05tk
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.
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.
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.
No other streaming platform offers a video catalog that covers nearly all aspects of human activities.
This has never existed in all of humanity.
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.
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.
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.
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".
“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.