291–300 of 1001 posts
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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.
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…
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…
Or, people are just more likely to see something closer to the top, that inspires them to comment.
Therefore, the top comment in a top page thread is itself a natural comment magnet.
I don't know of an antidote to this, except that I try not to do it myself. And wary of the possibility of a pot-kettle situation here.
Lot of people critiquing this, but you can't deny the success. I think a lot of the advice is applicable to startups. 1. KPIs, for Beast they are CTR, AVD, AVP, will look different if you are a startup. I am willing to bet he knows his metrics better than >95% of startup founders. Because he is literally hacking/being judged by an algorithm, his KPIs will matter more and can be closely dissected. Startups aren't that…
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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 don’t even think he’s gaming an algorithm. He doesn’t have to. He’s just making videos people will click on and then watch. It’s almost like he’s trying to make something people want. I’ve heard that before somewhere…
I find the lengths he has gone to in order to design his videos specifically for how YouTube works to be extremely impressive.
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Exactly... it feels weird that someone like Simon would fall for this and not see through it for what it is... someone spending his life being very efficient at building shit to sell it to an audience who's too lazy to consume anything but shit, all that paid by a capitalist system running on oil to allow all this shit to happen and enrich the shitster... We don't need to falsely pretend that those guys are interesti…
What did I fall for here? I think this is a really interesting document, despite having very few lessons I would adopt for my own work (as I said at the bottom of the post). I would be thrilled to read documents providing a level of cultural and operational detail like this from ANY company. Another one I find really interesting is the 37signals handbook: https://basecamp.com/handbook
I was on the set for one of the productions, and I'll just say at the time I thought the experience was a one-off for one of the bigger productions they've put on. Since reading other people's stories, it seems more a case where the pressure to push, push, push for the next big video is a ginormous machine that grinds people pretty hard.
An early stage startup, with a few employees, pushing to hit some milestone, could survive like that a while. But you can only burn through so many creative minds driving them at 110% all day like that. IMO, you have to find a sustainable burn rate that might be too much for some, but isn't going to drive away everyone desiring normal family / outside work life balance, especially 5-10 years into an org's lifetime.
MrBeast (the org) has hundreds of employees and probably 5-10 major active productions (in pre-prod, prod, and post-prod). They've achieved a lot of impressive results, but they also get to cut a lot of corners traditional media (Hollywood, TV production) can't due to labor laws and unions.
Edit: Not to mention, the 'No does not mean no' section was a bit alarming. There are plenty of times when no most certainly means no, and you can really damage business and personal relationships if you can't figure those out.
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What are they doing? They gave free cataract surgery to a huge number of people across the world, built wells, have distributed an ungodly amount of food and the list goes on. Just google the foundation and stop being grumpy. My bet is you will not be able to give away a tiny fraction of what they have in your whole life, even with all their flaws.
Fallacy of consequentialism. Yes, tons of people got free cataract surgery but that's a band-aid solution to cataract surgery being artificially locked behind a paywall all those people were unable to bypass, and the paywall still exists and is still preventing multiple factors of that group from accessing the same surgery. And wells in the developing world has been a charity money sink for decades at this point, ins…
[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/stand-out-of-our-light/...
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…
I skipped the “no doesn’t mean no” section because it felt like pure hustle culture to me, not to mention something which wouldn’t work outside of MrBeast because they can lean so heavily on their brand - “find an employee who has a kid who is a fan” etc.
I didn’t actually spot the relationship between the “no means no” section and the sexual abuse scandals (I’m apparently not completely up to date on MrBeast scandals) - I caught the bit about squid game and though that would be a useful thing to highlight to remind people that MrBeast’s history isn’t without its nasty incidents.