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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)

#441

Post by seizethecheese »

mrmetanoia wrote: post #349
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "sour grapes" attitude has IMO really started crowding out other content. Pretty much any popular content here just has a flood of social signaling content all about how morally wrong, bad, evil, etc the content is. And if you don't want to pile on the commentary, which is all pretty much the same thing regurgitated in different ways, then your content just kinda languishes at the bottom of the page. I don't real…

This site has a lot of interesting people that did and do interesting "hacker" type things that keep me coming back, but a lot of commenting is people looking to build things of questionable value, legality, or social good and sell them off and gtfo before the cracks show. Less "Hacker" More "Greed via Computer" So the idea that they aren't bothered by Mr Beast's lack of integrity is because they too find deceit acce…

Wait. You’re answering why this site is flooded with morale outrage with us vs them moral outrage?

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

#442

Post by simonw »

elliotec wrote: post #426
simonw wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn’t try to extract positives, I extracted what I personally found most interesting. 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 a…

You didn’t spot the relationship with the “no doesn’t mean no” stuff because as you said in the next sentence, you skipped it. Nice one.

> You didn’t spot the relationship with the “no doesn’t mean no” stuff because as you said in the next sentence, you skipped it.

No, it was because I had not read the news about MrBeast having a sexual predator on his team. My interpretation of the earlier comment here was that this should have been a flag that the heading “no doesn’t mean no” should have been called out.

Without that knowledge of the current predator scandal, I don’t think I was wrong to skip that section when writing up my summary. I read that section and it didn’t make my “highlights” list for when I wrote about the document.

I’m being defensive here because it sounds like you are calling me out for something, but I’m not sure what that something is.

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

#443

Post by aaronbrethorst »

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…

    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.
I genuinely do not know what you're trying to say here. For funsies, I tossed this into Claude 3.5 Sonnet with the prompt "Translate this into 7th grade English" (which is roughly Mr Beast's core audience?). Here was its response:

    I've seen something happening more and more on HN that bothers me.
    When someone writes something that goes against what most people
    think, the comments section gets filled with popular replies.
    These replies are basically just reasons why you don't need to
    think about changing your mind on this topic.
Assuming this is a reasonable analog to your original point, I would say that this definitionally what a mainstream response to contrarianism looks like.

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

#444

Post by killthebuddha »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #443
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…

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. I genuinely do not know what you're trying to say here. For funsies, I tossed this into Claude 3.5 Sonnet with the prompt "Translate this into 7th g…

I think it’s basically “HN is extremely hostile to iconoclastic ideas”

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

#445

Post by brigadier132 »

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…

This type of criticism reads to me as a general hatred of what humanity actually is. Mr Beast exists because humans like to watch it. By blaming Mr Beast, you are putting the effect before the cause. There is no enlightened society that is only watching MIT linear algebra lectures for fun, it doesn't exist.

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

#446

Post by roenxi »

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…

No chance it comes from understanding the world, it is an unfortunate social effect where attacking is much easier than defending. It is particularly apparent in politics where it has to be at least an order of magnitude easier to attack an opposing candidate for their weaknesses rather than defend a friendly candidate for some minor flaw.

And there isn't anything wrong with profit maximisation; we use profits to make decisions about resource allocation. That matters a lot, small inefficiencies leading to waste magnified over the entire economy represent huge damage to the people scraping by on the margins.

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

#447

Post by ta_1138 »

klik99 wrote: post #418
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 there's plenty to learn from it, but there's two big problems when applying his approach in a more generalized way: a) The youtube market is not like other markets, his strategy is successful because (among many things) the youtube algorithm promotes frequent posting. He knows youtube very well, but it's clear from his other business ventures that he's not good in other markets. I don't think you can translat…

It's true that having to push people to the breaking point is poison. However, there's the other, not poisonous side of the coin: Communication costs will kill your productivity, and communication degrades far faster than linearly as you add people.

So we don't want to break people, but adding one more person makes the company worse. So a very successful company is probably going to push people very hard, because otherwise communication costs eat it alive. I've been in way too many companies that got way worse over time, just because the headcount increases ruined productivity.

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

#448

Post by throw10920 »

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…

> 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?

I would hope not, because that's not really a thing to be "considered", because it's not factual (as implied by the word "understanding"), but an opinion.

There's very little empirical evidence for the claim that "everything has been turned only into profit maximization". It's not something that's true or false - it's a worldview, an emotional outlook. One can imagine other worldviews like "the profit maximization is a direct result of the government not doing its job to break up monopolies" or "I disagree, very few of the companies I interact with are doing profit maximization in a way that significantly negatively impacts me". You can argue about which of those is "true" and find various factoids on the internet that "back them up", but ultimately they're just ways that you look at the world with little empirical basis.

As such, predicating all of your comments on them and pushing them at every turn is boring, and against the purpose of HN, which is intellectual curiosity. Reviewing the guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) should pretty quickly tell you why this content isn't appropriate for HN:

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

> Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.

These "sour grapes" comments and cynicism-without-substance comments are very clearly not gratifying to one's intellectual curiosity, and almost always fall into the realm of generic tangents and internet tropes.

There's a place for activism, but it's not here.

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

#449

Post by testfrequency »

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 credit HN for being the unofficial hangout for nerd snipers

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

#450

Post by danpalmer »

troad wrote: post #397
danpalmer wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

My read of the book was that at the beginning Enron was attempting to use M2M for their "Gas Bank" concept, and at that point it wasn't obvious that it was wrong, and it wasn't fraud either. We now don't accept M2M accounting for what they were using it for, but they were seemingly the first (or first to get noticed?) to use it in the way they did and if things worked out differently maybe it would have stuck. In this way I think it's a bit of a case of "history is written by the victor".

By the end they were doing clear and obvious fraud, particularly in how they orchestrated the incoming funding for projects, and it had become clear that M2M was not working, but I don't think this was the only possible outcome.

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