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How to succeed in MrBeast production (Leaked PDF)

simonwillison.net

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Re: How to succeed in MrBeast production (Leaked PDF)

#281

Post by usefulcat »

GlacierFox wrote: post #273
shalmanese wrote: post #217

One distressing trend I've noticed becoming ubiquitous on HN is that any writing that is confronting to a consensus worldview becomes flooded with highly upvoted comments that are, in essence, excuses for why it's not necessary in this instance to re-examine your priors. He's making low value content/the culture of the company is horrible/he's a fraud/it's more luck than skill. The actual critiques are personalized t…

Is it just me or is the way you construct sentences jarring and hard to read? Not sure if it's my dyslexia but I had trouble deciphering the first couple of paragraphs/word jumbles.

Is this meta-meta commentary? I genuinely don’t know but if so I salute you.

Re: How to succeed in MrBeast production (Leaked PDF)

#282

Post by worstspotgain »

brookst wrote: post #98
zulban wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The guy has earned a net worth of maybe $700 million starting with YouTube. Saying it's all a bunch of contrived bullshit hides the fact the he is obviously brilliantly talented and dedicated at making a business from YouTube. If you or others blow off a document he wrote or an interview he gives because most of his videos are "just" gaming an algorithm then you must not be a very curious person. I don't like coffee…

I like your perspective but I don’t think liking coffee is the right comparison. It’s closer to reading a manual for a successful casino, where a lot of it is about manipulation rather than creating value. Obviously Mr. Beast isn’t as far out ethically as casinos, but IMO more in that direction than coffee tea preferences.

A casino is the scummiest business this side of drug cartels and real estate. Edgy reality TV is more in the ballpark.

Re: How to succeed in MrBeast production (Leaked PDF)

#283

Post by j45 »

Nextgrid wrote: post #182
zulban wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The guy has earned a net worth of maybe $700 million starting with YouTube. Saying it's all a bunch of contrived bullshit hides the fact the he is obviously brilliantly talented and dedicated at making a business from YouTube. If you or others blow off a document he wrote or an interview he gives because most of his videos are "just" gaming an algorithm then you must not be a very curious person. I don't like coffee…

His comment has merit. The Beast business is fundamentally at the mercy of YouTube, the algorithm and their business priorities. In fact Beast's intentional focus on making the best YouTube videos highlights this. Beast is a high-touch content farm, but ultimately still a content farm and vulnerable to the exact same risks as any other one.

When the brand is strong and outgrows a platform..

The brand could start their own complementary platform too.

Not much different than the content becoming its own media network.

Re: How to succeed in MrBeast production (Leaked PDF)

#284

Post by bwy »

shalmanese wrote: post #217

One distressing trend I've noticed becoming ubiquitous on HN is that any writing that is confronting to a consensus worldview becomes flooded with highly upvoted comments that are, in essence, excuses for why it's not necessary in this instance to re-examine your priors. He's making low value content/the culture of the company is horrible/he's a fraud/it's more luck than skill. The actual critiques are personalized t…

I wonder how many of those "sour grapes" commenters have actually read the thing–my guess, not many.

Then on the first page of the "silly little book," where I already have the question: "why should I read this? Why would an employee spend time reading this?" Immediately he addresses that: "if you read this book and pass a quiz I’ll give you $1,000." And if you've seen MrBeast videos, it's not inconceivable that everyone who's read the manual has actually received $1,000.

Corporate leaders would do well to learn from just this. What are you saying in the all-hands meeting that takes 1,000 SWE-hours that's actually worth that much? What value does your employee handbook/documentation provide (in my experience, a lot of documentation provides negative value by virtue of being so out-of-date, confusing, or just wrong).

Jimmy has probably done the math (in a intuitive sense; I don't think he has strong math skills), and it's worth the employee-hours for him to pay them $1,000 to read this PDF to avoid having them waste time or make mistakes they've already made. It's probably worth a lot more than $1,000.

Re: How to succeed in MrBeast production (Leaked PDF)

#285

Post by [deleted] »

xrd wrote: post #81

I have kids and I'm really bothered by MrBeast. I had to buy goddamn chocolate bars at Walmart because of him. I acknowledge he is creative and driven but the content is such crap, with a few exceptions that my kids point out. But, what's the alternative? For example, I love 3brown1blue videos. But, it is too advanced even for my eleven year old. Mark Rober videos are great, and my kids love them, but he's even insid…

[deleted]

Re: How to succeed in MrBeast production (Leaked PDF)

#286

Post by ocean_moist »

latexr wrote: post #200

> Lot of people critiquing this, but you can't deny the success. 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.

>Imagine seeing a PDF proving tobacco leaders knew for decades that it caused cancer and saying what you did.

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.

Re: How to succeed in MrBeast production (Leaked PDF)

#287

Post by sweeter »

I think the authors intention was to pull any positives from this document that they could, but it seems almost negligent to not even mention the "no doesn't mean no" section of this document. As well as the context of the current ongoing gigantic mess, where Mr Beast tortured a guy while doing a "I spent X Hours in Solitary Confinement" video, and had to scrap it after the contestant was harmed.

They refused to shut the lights off for days on end and then coerced the contestant to run a literal marathon on a treadmill... and then there's the sexual abuse allegations high up in his team, hiring a convicted child predator and someone else with a long sexual abuse criminal history, among other things. I'm not sure I would talk his business practices up without directly making some kind of distinction or acknowledgement here.

Re: How to succeed in MrBeast production (Leaked PDF)

#288

Post by helloplanets »

smsm42 wrote: post #10

> “I Spent 50 Hours In Ketchup” > In general the more extreme the better. I may be sounding like "get off my lawn" guy right now but should there be some realization that these people are a cultural analogue of if not heroin than at least cigarettes? They are making a good living from making things objectively worse in a society by tickling the base instincts of the addicts. I am not calling for government interventi…

Wasn't Fear Factor this exact same concept already, twenty years ago?

Re: How to succeed in MrBeast production (Leaked PDF)

#289

Post by greesil »

j45 wrote: post #276
greesil wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At face value, this is not a culture that would reward risk taking. It's very operations focused. Get x done on day y or you're fired. Maybe they do value risk taking on the creative side?

Learning why it’s done the way it’s done before bringing up the beginner questions they get answered over and over is reasonable.

If you're hiring junior people then sure. In Mr Beast's interview with Lex Fridman, he says he actually prefers hiring people from outside the entertainment industry because those folks really want to do what they did before, how they did it before, and not the Mr Beast way. Reading between the lines, I think he ends up hiring a lot of junior people because they're not set in their ways. Also probably they'll work long hours because they're just getting their start.

Re: How to succeed in MrBeast production (Leaked PDF)

#290

Post by naming_the_user »

tpmoney wrote: post #250
simonw wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m with you on the management vibes - it doesn’t sound like a culture that I’d enjoy. 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 ch…

What I find interesting in reading this is that it's not particularly surprising in content. And I don't mean that I expected some hugely toxic culture from a youtube company and found it. I mean that the whole document is largely pretty standard "how to make it in a competitive industry" advice. The tone might be a little unprofessional for folks who are used to big corporate talk, but if you'd leaked internal Micro…

Yeah, it reads as being pretty standard to me.

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.

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