Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How to succeed in MrBeast production (Leaked PDF)

simonwillison.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

391–400 of 1001 posts

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

#391

Post by TheAceOfHearts »

gleventhal wrote: post #359

I don't have the energy for an intellectual debate, but personally, I have the sense that Youtube is net bad for the world and the monetization of Youtube has incentivized and amplified mediocrity, stupidity, and social decay. I don't follow or watch Mr Beast videos, but from what I've seen, they are largely driven by a money fetish and as far as "creativity", it feels on par with the more boring "What would you rath…

For as much slop as gets produced on YouTube, I think the high quality educational content more than makes up for it. You can literally look up any subject and find a full blown series on the topic.

His huge budgets and willingness to reinvest all the profits into future videos have allowed MrBeast to produce a lot of unique videos which are effectively unmatched by anyone else. Right now they're really the undisputed kings of the platform, by a massive margin.

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

#392

Post by sashank_1509 »

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…

The way I understand this is that now HN commentators are filled with what Nietzche would call the “last-men” who have “last-men” values while in the past it was not as widespread. Another site filled with such people is Reddit, where I stopped bothering to comment anymore as it is far more dominated by people in this category than HN.

Yes, it is exhausting to read through those comments, more exhausting to argue against them. Not sure if it is worth it anymore, this is probably not a tide that can be stopped. But HN is still one of the few sites that is not wholly dominated by last men, and you can find thoughtful comments that broaden your perspective occasionally. Enjoy it while it lasts!

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

#393

Post by aantix »

gleventhal wrote: post #359

I don't have the energy for an intellectual debate, but personally, I have the sense that Youtube is net bad for the world and the monetization of Youtube has incentivized and amplified mediocrity, stupidity, and social decay. I don't follow or watch Mr Beast videos, but from what I've seen, they are largely driven by a money fetish and as far as "creativity", it feels on par with the more boring "What would you rath…

>Youtube is net bad for the world

Disagree. The outliers don’t determine the value of the platform.

The videos of people creating, fixing, coding, diagnosing, doing every day random things - those are a gift to humanity.

Those visual demonstrations transcend language. Because of this, YouTube is more important than Google or any written word website.

Knowledge share is finally global.

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

#394

Post by klyrs »

pembrook wrote: post #365
mihaic wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you considered that the sour grapes attitude actually comes from an understanding of the world, and how everything has been turned only into profit maximization? And that the nitpicking is merely a failure to express that understanding of the world, especially since it seems like pro-status quo commenters don't care to learn more? I think I'm one of the sour grapes commenters often, and I've very often tried to…

> Have you considered that the sour grapes attitude actually comes from an understanding of the world I would argue the opposite. Often the comments that OP is describing are people who have very little knowledge of the topic at hand, only strongly held emotional feelings based on some narrative that appeals to their bias. The problem is, HN is a crowd of people who grew up believing they would all become the next St…

I love it when the community psychoanalyzes itself

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

#395

Post by simonw »

yunwal wrote: post #389
dcchambers wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least your two examples try to tell a story. They have some artistic integrity. Mr. Beast has one goal: Eyes on content. For a long as possible. There is no artistic vision - every decision is made in the name of profit, attention, and addiction.

I barely know who Mr. Beast is but isn't his whole channel about, like, the joy of doing nice things for people? Like yes, it's for profit, and yes, it's schlocky and distasteful to us wise adults or whatever, but there's seriously nothing you find redeeming about kids enjoying seeing people getting their vision restored?

That’s some of his channel. Other bits of his channel are about putting people through extreme conditions to try and win money.

The Rolling Stone profile has a good breakdown of his content cerca 2022: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/mrbeas...

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

#396

Post by cdchn »

mihaic wrote: post #249
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…

Have you considered that the sour grapes attitude actually comes from an understanding of the world, and how everything has been turned only into profit maximization? And that the nitpicking is merely a failure to express that understanding of the world, especially since it seems like pro-status quo commenters don't care to learn more? I think I'm one of the sour grapes commenters often, and I've very often tried to…

What did you think was well written about it? Did it provide any useful or unique insights? The writing itself seemed terrible and riddled with spelling errors.

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

#397

Post by troad »

danpalmer wrote: post #305
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 really enjoyed the book "The Smartest Guys in the Room" about the Enron scandal for two reasons. The first and more obvious was that it was a deeper look into the systemic issues that led to the failures, which meant it was less "they did a fraud" and more about the way culture evolves at a company to the point that they did it. Perhaps more importantly though, was my takeaway that it mostly wasn't fraud, it was tr…

> Perhaps more importantly though, was my takeaway that it mostly wasn't fraud, it was truly innovative accounting that with hindsight was the wrong idea, but if the world worked out just a bit differently, could have led to them winning the market and taking the financial world in a new direction. It's not obvious to me that the fraud timeline is the only one or even the most likely one, we'll never know.

I don't think it's disputable that what Enron was doing, by the end, was fraud. 'The Smartest Guys in the Room' got a little too caught up in attacking mark-to-market, which itself isn't intrinsically fraudulent, but boy can it be misused for fraud, and the Enron guys absolutely and inarguably used M2M (among many other things) for fraud. Wilfully and knowingly.

Life is indeed shades of grey, but don't get so unmoored in your relativism that you end up giving cover to people doing genuinely bad things.

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

#398

Post by blackeyeblitzar »

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…

In case people aren’t aware of the “fraud” accusations mentioned in this comment, here’s a video: https://youtu.be/k5xf40KrK3I

There are many more discussing all that has come out recently about that channel.

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

#399

Post by rsoto2 »

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…

He constantly runs illegal lotteries and lies to kids. What is so complex and insightful about your understanding of this situation that you have to hide it in the group chat? Companies like uber and lyft constantly ride the line of illegality and that's how they're able to turn profits.

tldr it's not that deep bro, business people are shady and draw ire mostly thanks to decades of business people being shady and drawing ire.

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

#400

Post by rsoto2 »

johnfn wrote: post #344
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 think this style of meta commentary is more damaging to any discourse than the behavior that you're saying you've identified. Looking over the top comments, other than yours, I see a good majority of people honestly trying to engage with the content. I'm not exactly sure where you're seeing a "ubiquitous "sour grapes" attitude", but it seems to me that your own post typifies such a description more than the rest of…

I would refute this point but my opinion is actually too based and even scares me.
Post reply on HN