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On Mr. Beast and being alone in a circle for 100 days

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Re: On Mr. Beast and being alone in a circle for 100 days

#151

Post by mcv »

lawrenceyan wrote: post #43

Is this the algorithm or just late-stage capitalism / pre-post scarcity economics? I think situations like these will only become increasingly prevalent as time passes thanks to technological development decreasing the raw resource cost of goods and services. Because while we have a good mechanism for reliably increasing productivity and efficiency, no analogous mechanism exists for distribution. Thus profit / wealth…

> I have no idea how you actually come up with a reasonable solution for this since communism/socialism clearly failed.

You could simply give people more than just some drips that keep them on the edge of desperation. Whether or not you consider that socialism, it has been quite successful in a lot of countries. The failure of a totalitarian dictatorship in no way implies that excessive wealth inequality is the only alternative.

Re: On Mr. Beast and being alone in a circle for 100 days

#152

Post by mihaic »

I think one thing most posts saying "he optimizes for the algorithm" ignore is that content also slowly influences our desired and our culture. It's all a gigantic and relatively slow-moving feedback loop, where content influences culture and desires, which again influences content.

MrBeast's videos I find particularly damaging to culture, since it's incredibly dehumanizing and stripped of any nuance of the labor/value/money dynamic.

It's sad that I've become less and less confident that people can be trusted with what they consume -- food, content, anything.

Re: On Mr. Beast and being alone in a circle for 100 days

#154

Post by prepend »

elp wrote: post #138
kwhitefoot wrote: post #44

IS this real?

He kept coming up when my kid watched YouTube. I sat through a few before I started blocking them. Everyone is entitled to their opinion. Personally I'm pretty sure its all fake. The reactions are not quite right for people winning so much money. I'm pretty sure I've seen some of the winners as extras in other videos. He got caught handing out fake money which he claimed was for "security". If you were Mr Beast would…

It would save a lot of money if he just did stunts with friends who didn’t actually keep the money.

Kind of like all the NFT wash trades.

Re: On Mr. Beast and being alone in a circle for 100 days

#155

Post by seydor »

loceng wrote: post #105
ZephyrBlu wrote: post #59

This feels very doom and gloom. Mr Beast gets to make the videos he wants, viewers get to watch amazing videos and people who are featured in the videos generally get paid. Everyone wins. Most of his videos are basically excuses to give people money and you rarely see participants not having a good time. Having the guy sit around for 100d is the most 'exploitative' video I've seen, but that really doesn't seem like t…

Should we ignore that all of this is funded by the advertising industrial complex, advertisements which are arguably extremely harmful to society due to the cheap-shallow manipulation that occurs with them?

Should we ignore the fact that so many people watch his videos that it's impossible to ignore the number? I agree that his videos are basically a polished version of "give a homeless guy money to do something cruel". People watch them to see what people do for money. There s nothing beautiful in that, but it's a curiosity and it grabs attention. If it wasnt through ads, someone else would be funding it, i dont think that being ad-supported changes the dynamic of his audience.

Re: On Mr. Beast and being alone in a circle for 100 days

#156

Post by idontwantthis »

bhhaskin wrote: post #26
idontwantthis wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use an extension called click bait remover that replaces thumbnails with an actual frame from the video. Also normalizes capitalization.

That sounds like a great extension, but at the same time I just block those channels that engage in that. None of them make any content worth consuming.

LTT does it and they make genuinely good videos.

Re: On Mr. Beast and being alone in a circle for 100 days

#157

Post by prepend »

M4v3R wrote: post #123
prepend wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He says he doesn’t care about personal wealth yet doesn’t donate to charity and instead amasses quite a bit of wealth. He’s not odd, he’s just a YouTuber who is really good at SEOing youtube and getting billions of views.

> yet doesn’t donate to charity You obviously have no idea what are you talking about. He not only donates to charity, he actually set up a charity by himself called Beast Philanthropy where he supplies people in need with food, schools with supplies, etc. He also spearheaded two huge ecological campaigns - Team Trees (to plant millions of trees around the globe) and Team Seas (to clean up tonnes of garbage from the…

Thanks, I stand corrected as Beast Philanthropy is a 501(c)3 charity.

I don’t see it on CharityNavigator.org so not sure how it’s audited and how effective it is but at least he seems to have filed the proper paperwork.

Re: On Mr. Beast and being alone in a circle for 100 days

#158

Post by seydor »

shitloadofbooks wrote: post #52

I watch most of Mr Beasts videos (primarily because "the algorithm" throws them at my face until I give in), but his recent interview with Graham Stephen[1] shows another side of him. He lives in his office, doesn't care about personal wealth and is absolutely dedicated to making YouTube videos. He's definitely an odd fellow. [1] https://youtu.be/yADi4cs4Dhw

Interesting that your comment got some emotional responses. Do people identify with MrBeast as a person? I mean he s good at what he does but he s a cruel executionist, not relatable at all after he leaves the office. He 's entertaining, or else he would be as sleazy as the other person in that video.

Re: On Mr. Beast and being alone in a circle for 100 days

#159

Post by hombre_fatal »

prepend wrote: post #149
jccalhoun wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on how he is measuring it. If it is just in terms of what he gets from youtube and not advertising then it is easier to imagine. Then there is also the fact that it is probably the case that for every one of these big budget videos that don't make money he has several smaller ones that do make money. The big ones bring in the audience and the small ones bring in the money.

> If it is just in terms of what he gets from youtube and not advertising then it is easier to imagine. Well this is an odd way to measure profitable. What’s the benefit to this method? Imagine if Google said “we lose money on every search run. Unless you count the advertising, then we make billions. But we lose money on most of our activities.” This just seems naively stupid. Because “most videos” is a dumb metric.…

He’s obviously saying that the views he gets from some video doesn’t always pull in the money it took to create that video which is mostly a point of how much he invests into zany sets, huge giveaways, and such.

Re: On Mr. Beast and being alone in a circle for 100 days

#160

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

pjc50 wrote: post #38

> "Whenever I watch these videos I’m awed and scared at the lengths to which humans in the twenty-first century will go to slurp up the drips of unimaginable wealth that the algorithm leaks out through Mr. Beast." That's it, isn't it? It's the exact opposite of dignity of labour: it's compensation for degradation. The "voluntary" part is just highlighting how willing people are to trade in unnecessary misery for the…

> That's it, isn't it? It's the exact opposite of dignity of labour: it's compensation for degradation.

You're not wrong, but it's not that new - see 1930s dance marathons https://www.historylink.org/file/5534#

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