Thanks, I’ll take your word for it at face value. It’s good to know that. That he’s no representing his actions as philanthropic. My distaste for him is therefore rooted in his content coming through an untraditional vector and my initial experience through my kids thinking he was trying to help people.
I’ve explained things to my kids, they get it now too. And if he’s honest about what he’s trying to do then I thinks it’s mostly okay and I can just recalibrate my thinking, nudge things towards putting his category of content in the same box as something like the Survivor reality TV show, which is mostly fine. MrBeast has simply distributed his content in a different way.
Good thread! part of why I come to HN. One of the few places for public discourse online where there’s opportunity for an actual exchange of ideas and changing opinions. (I mean it’s possible, plenty of people still dug in and are resistant to discussion of something in a way that could change their mind. Which is still even okay, we all have harder held opinions, and because disagreement here is often still productive to read through and rarely descends to toxic levels.)
Today, I am thankful that HN is not a toxic waste dump of flame wars and troll bait and provides an outlet to discuss interesting things with random stranger who are often way smarter than me. Happy Thanksgiving to all of the Americans reading this! As you sit down to meals with family and friends or even if you’re alone, I wish you all well and hope you all have ample things to be thankful for.
For parts of the world that don’t celebrate a thanksgiving of sorts on this day, f&ck you. kidding! I’m thankful for all of you too and wish you well just as much. We’re all entirely too interconnected these days to ignore the fact that what’s good for $X group of people in the world, to the extent that it doesn’t harm others in any significant way, adds an incremental amount to the collective uplift provided by civilization.
From one American to the global HN community, I’m thankful for you all. Except #@dang. Dang is too good. I’m convinced ycombinator either has like a GPT-5 model bot trained to do things here or there’s an army of not-dangs working behind the scenes to keep this community roughly on the rails. ;) Happy Thanksgiving Dang(s)!