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.

Your telecom operator? It exploits that you miss your mom but too lazy to visit? Your grocery store? That you are hungry but can't grow your own food.

What documents like this reveal is *how* these businesses are exploiting you and the means by which they are guiding you to achieve their goals.

These methods are valuable knowledge regardless of finality. The same tactics used by big oil can also serve environmentalists to convince people to adopt clean energy, for example.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yoo6XVxpiU8

Edit: and whether it happens or not, my question was related to whether mr beast dangling a million dollars for someone to stand in a circle for 100 days is as unethical as price gouging essential items. One may take advantage of a few people and is probably not extremely biased towards the most vulnerable, (e.g. the participants are probably not homeless), the other is taking advantage of everyone, homelessness is surging in aus atm. I see Mr beasts videos as far less damaging than the current problem in Australia.

The terminological disagreement makes it easier to miss abusive exploitation.

When there's choice/competition and transparency/information (i.e. not some form of advanced psychological manipulation going on that can be impossible to economically avoid for many), who's being exploited?

Business transactions are exploitative. That's the entire point of them. Otherwise it'd just be tit-for-tat or a gift economy. You don't want to recover your investment, you want to grow your investment. And beating inflation is the baseline.

I'd probably agree that it makes sense to try to find a synonym where possible, but I wouldn't say it's necessary in cases where it would not be succinct or clear otherwise.

The grocery store doesn't exploit my inability to grow food, it enables me to do something more productive with my time instead of growing food and leaving that part of society to the experts. Food surplus and specialization are vital concepts to any advanced society.

If you have infinite time, resources, patience, sure, you might be able to provide the same thing for yourself, but not everyone has a farm, not everyone has the time or ability to visit Grandma...

Shady businesses try to sell you gum while on your call to Grandma (nothing to do with calling grandma, just a "value-added" thing).

I'd also posit, if you don't know the difference, you're probably being exploited yourself. I'd take a hard look at who you are giving money to, and try re-evaluate if they are providing you value or not (with respect to your circumstances).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

(The book is historical fiction)

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.

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

By de facto, you never ignore ethics. You may disregard them, but they're never ignored.

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.

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.

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.

are we really that far off these days, in this economy?

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.

Name any ethical company and I'm sure there will be questionable actions they did in past with "due to the market conditions" excuse.

It's absurd to attempt to equate two actions completely out of their context to claim that "everyone is unethical sometimes ".

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.

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.

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?

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.

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)

That was my point.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

- 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).

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.

There are lots of startups in SV looking for "cracked engineers" and frankly this sounds a bit like that!

Just say he's "efficient" at what he does (descriptive) but not "successful" (value judgment)

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.

Are Marvel films shady for being popular? Is HN shady for adding features which increase engagement?

You don’t think this is optimized for for engagement? Don’t let the beige design fool you.

Instead look at reddit is desperately trying (inline ads, chat, avatars, forcing app use)

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-...

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.

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.

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

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".

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

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

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.

- 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.)

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."

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.

(Regarding tobacco, see a different thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41552737)

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)

That's not my department, " says Wernher von Braun.

Is anyone saying that Mr Beast is good and shouldn't be criticised? I can't see them.

Being efficient at destroying the planet is NOT success

If anything we need to go slower and gentler (environmentally, socially, economically), not "faster"

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.

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.

It is almost certainly not generalizable advice for achieving “success” in the cooperative game of life on earth.

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).

You do know Taliban, Karl Marx and Christians can all make moral arguments to argue against something

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

  > Can you point to the parts of the document, or other resources about Mr. Beast,
  > that warrant a comparison with tobacco companies?

Right, and where is the problem with that again?

We share a planet with nearly 10 billion other people. Money isn't everything.

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.

More startups should be this transparent about their stated/desired culture (even if unintentionally).

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.

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.

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.

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.

What's the thing I'm missing that makes this cynical?

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.

The dichotomy sometimes

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.

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.

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.

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”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

They give the example of picking a filming location you aren’t likely to get permission to film in but would produce outstanding content.

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.

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?

[1] https://danluu.com/p95-skill/

- 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

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).

The Biden administration is basically the first one to take these violations of antitrust law seriously since Carter.

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?

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.

Inertia. It's very difficult to outrun someone who has a head start.

Those guys are just selling shit to people that are so lazy that the only thing they consume is shit

It's not a "success".. or it's a "success" for very wrong metrics.. it's as stupid as saying Hitler or Attila were successes

I do not understand the attraction of nearly all YouTube creators and celebrities. I don't get the appeal. All the videos sound the same and have the same stupid looking tag lines to get you to watch them. Outrageous actions for attention are deeply troubling to me.

And I'm also SUPER aware that it's because it's not for me. I'm not the target demographic at all, and never will be.

At some point you have to realize that the world moves on, and that's just part of getting older. It feels awesome when you're 18-24 and everything is relevant to you. It feels way less awesome when you're over 40 and everything seems to be out of control.

So I’ve switched to using RSS to follow the specific niche creators that add value for me. As a result, my YT experience is entirely unlike what the YT algorithm suggests.

[1]: https://sponsor.ajay.app/ ; https://dearrow.ajay.app/

My official YT subscriptions are now just a subset, mostly as a mechanism to give small channels a little algorithm boost.

Check out stuff by Johnny Harris , veritasium, etc… for more educational stuff.

Also I didn’t like the ageism comment. I’m about your age and I can definitely understand the appeal of Mr. Beast. I feel a lot of the disdain for him is more snobbery than anything. Some people think they’re better or too good for that type of entertainment. If you truly don’t understand the appeal I think that’s actually a sign of autism. It’s unlikely you’re autistic and it’s more likely to be snobbery disguised as lack of understanding.

Entertainment is usually mindless anyway. It’s not like Shakespeare is some higher form of entertainment. It’s all snobbery that segregates these things. Transformers has more technical complexity and represents a bigger human achievement then Shakespeare.

The technical know how of thousands of people utilizing technology decades in development combined together to achieve the transformers movie to tell a story with more clarity then the equally cliche story of Romeo and Juliet.

It’s all mindless entertainment and class based prejudice.

Mr. Beast videos are actually insightful and educational in certain contexts. It’s just snobbery all the way down.

(derek's results in the linked video, which incidentally links to one of the two i linked above, were quantitatively different but qualitatively similar)

the really unintuitive thing about this i think is that people think of electrical energy as flowing inside wires, when actually almost all of it flows around the wires, as veritasium explained quite ably. this is something people doing high-speed pcb layout have to deal with a lot in order to avoid emi problems

as i understand it, derek has a ph.d. in physics, or actually in physics education research https://youtube.fandom.com/wiki/Veritasium. that doesn't mean he knows everything about physics, but generally my experience with people in ph.d. programs is that they're good at listening to counterarguments and admitting when they're wrong, and also seeking out experts before publishing

(i think the veritasium video does contain a minor error in that it says electrons collide with metal ions, which as i understand it is not exactly how ohmic resistance works—the 'electrons' moving through the lattice are not exactly electrons but virtual particles similar to phonons or plasmons, and so the things they scatter off of are not individual ions—but possibly derek knows this and was intentionally simplifying, or possibly my understanding is wrong. i mean, i don't have a ph.d. in anything, much less solid-state quantum physics! derek certainly knows the electrons traveling through the wire aren't point-like particles bouncing around like billiard balls, and that the ions aren't red spheres with plus signs on them, despite depicting them that way.)

electrons are moving through the wire. The virtual particle thing is a misunderstanding on your part I think.

I think your talking about current. Current flows in the opposite direction of electron drift velocity. In the simplified model they use these things called negative and positive charges flowing through the wire and current is defined as the movement of positive charge. These "charges" are of course virtual in nature because it's not what's actually happens.

What actually happens is negative charge is moving and positive charge (protons) are frozen.

And yes of course derek knows that it's a wave traveling through the lattice.

there is a good introductory presentation in https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/III_13.html but note that it assumes some previous familiarity with quantum mechanics. §13.6 explains that mostly what the electrons (really propagating waves of quantum probability amplitude for there to be an extra electron) are scattering off of is imperfections in the lattice. but that can't be the whole story or all perfect crystals would be superconductors

Theres no YouTuber without criticism. Referring to no one in particular: There’s even offensive snobbish garbage comments equivalent to the banality of Mr. Beast videos here on HN yet this doesn’t reflect the overall vibe here.

Don’t try to bring my overall point down by attacking one particular aspect of one particular example. What should the snobbery of some of the commentary on HN here render the entire site moot? No. My point stands regardless.

No, you giving two for two garbage suggestions shows how easy it can be for garbage content to masquerade as good. Both on YouTube, in HN comments, and elsewhere.

Shakespeare is Wicked or Hamilton is probably a good modern comparison.

The evidence behind the accusations is sooooo bad.

The point here is the finality: pure waste of resources

it's a question of "grow up and look at reality for what it is"

we're on a planet with limited resources that we have to preserve

and we're celebrating people doing shit videos like "I spent 24h in Ketchup" as "big successes" to be emulated ?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5xf40KrK3I

It's also silly to imply that simply doing some philanthropy somehow washes out anything bad you might have done. Often philanthropy is precisely a PR exercise to distract from that stuff.

Meanwhile the entire point of "giveaways" and the lotteries he runs is so that children will beg mom and dad to buy them Mr Beast's garbage chocolate for a high price that tastes like ass for a hope that it contains a golden ticket like some sort of Capitalist Evil Willy Wonka.

And the answer to that question is that it's not profitable to provide clean drinking water to people who can't pay for it. Not that it's not possible, not that it's not a solved engineering problem, clearly it is because some fuckin YouTuber pony's up the cash and suddenly there's a goddamn well. The only reason it's not already there is because we decided someone has to pay for the problem to be solved, and if none of the people who need it solved can afford it, we let them continue drinking dirty water and die from preventable illness because they were born in the wrong income bracket.

And by the same logic, why does Mr. Beast have this money in the first place? Because he's making bullshit videos about """solving""" these problems, because presenting loud, stupid nonsense to a western audience, for free, so they can be showed video ads in the midst of it, is worth enough to pay for these fucking wells.

To make this completely fucking clear: the attention of a western, young audience who's parents have money to spend and may, MIGHT, influence them to buy a product, is worth more than providing clean fucking drinking water to entire villages of people who live in a non-western place, with enough leftover for Mr. Beast to draw a frankly unethical salary for what he's actually doing, and providing to the world. That level of inequity between two groups of people is the grand fucking canyon.

And, to make this other point extra clear, that's not Mr. Beast's fault. He's acting completely rationally within a system that has utterly lost the plot in terms of what actually has value. The fact that unhinged amounts of money are going to a frankly, by all accounts I can find, quite amoral man who has cracked the code for generating loud, obnoxious nonsense that children will consume on an industrial scale so equally morally bankrupt companies can shove advertisements down their eyeballs and convince them to buy shit they don't need, so much so that he can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to make yet more loud, obnoxious bullshit, is the problem. All of this is so completely and thoroughly disentangled from any notion of what anyone actually needs, and the fact that tons of people on this board and elsewhere still manage to call this system the most rational economic system yet discovered while looking at this complete fucking nonsense is astonishing to me.

Ok. so then the world is a better place because instead of having zero solutions, there is instead an imperfect solution.

Glad you agree that this is still massively a good thing.

> why don't you ask "why do so many people all across the world lack clean water?"

Then other people should feel free to go do something to fix that, instead of attacking other people who are fixing it in their own way.

> it is because some fuckin YouTuber pony's up the cash and suddenly there's a goddamn well.

Yep. There is a well. That is measurably helping people. And the world is a significantly better place with that well than without it.

[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/stand-out-of-our-light/...

(I mean I get it: they are "good at making money" and "efficient" so you call it a "success" because that's what the capitalist society is pushing you to say / feel without asking yourself deeper questions)

Would you say that "heroin" is a success because it's very good at making people dependant?

You should probably use the term "they are very efficient at what they are doing" (descriptive) rather than "they are successful" (value judgment)

And then you should ask yourself: why are you praising efficiency for the sake of it?

And if you look further at the world, can't you see that efficiency and speed is actually one of our big issues? It's because we're over-efficient that we're consuming so much oil, decimating species, polluting our planet

If we were less efficient, sure we might have less stuff to play with (but who really cares?), but we would not be damaging our world so much

Perhaps you can take a few minutes to think deeply about it, and it might change your definition of "a success"

There are plenty of successful politicians who I disagree with on virtually every issue. I would still classify them as “successful” and I am still interested in understanding how they managed to achieve those goals, despite disliking what they have done with those skills.

I'm betting over 90% of what we do, collectively, really doesn't offer any true "value" to the world for however you're defining value.

Which means that your measurement is bad because it's based on your opinion.

Just like your comparison to Hitler. For supporters of Hitler, the things he did were amazing. But that was just their opinion.

They just sell shit. Why should we rejoice because they do it efficiently?

But one thing that did help me gain perspective is a comment that these are literally global products where English is a second language at best. They’re designed to really be the least common denominator.

Someone who wants to make YouTube videos or not can ask themselves.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

- 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.

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.

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.

That is simple to do but not something many companies want to do. Just give employees equity via mutualisation. (Real ownership not discourse ownership)

How do you know they are unqualified?

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.

content for dumb kids

"Just hire good employees, why did no one think of this before!"

...seriously?

Meanwhile, Mr Beast was hiring several people that were abusing minors, while being a YT channel that caters to children.

You guys are like a 14yo that just stumbled upon the Communist Manifesto, and think it can work in real life.

You people are delusional.

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 :)

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.

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?

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.

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.

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?

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?

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.

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.

Oh, yeah I get what you’re saying now. Give in to peer pressure!

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.

No argument here.

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.

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.

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.

What's definitely a valid target of criticism are the methods, though.

You don't have to imagine very hard.

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"

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".

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.

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.

I think this is you reading this into the comment. They don't mention efficiency.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

> Many people in entertainment feel lucky to be a paid employee at all

And this is BY CHOICE.

I fundamentally disagree with your positioning.

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!)

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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 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"

You can't strip out the valuable content from a sentence and then claim it was always identical to valueless sentences.

>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.