621–630 of 1001 posts
> 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.
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…
And though the advice isn't particularly novel, it was worth reading since a surprisingly large amount of people don't do these simple things.
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…
> 750+ words of my takeaways I briefly considered also posting to share with the community I'm not going to beg you to share it after all, but just letting you know: if you would, I'd read it.
[flagged]
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…
That’s one of the most interesting parts of this document. Many people will read it and think “I would never work at a place like that,” and many others would think “that’s exactly the environment I want to work in!” More startups should be this transparent about their stated/desired culture (even if unintentionally).
Example, I work for an energy company. Their objective is to earn money. They earn money by selling gas and electricity to their customers. Their revenue increases if they have more customers, using more electricity/gas, and if the price goes up. If they were honest, they would be pushing their customers to use more energy; "Hot in summer? Get an AC! Cold in winter? Don't wear a sweater, crank up the thermostat! Have you considered a sauna and jaccuzi? Isn't a long hot bath nice?" that kind of thing.
But all energy companies' marketing talk (both internal and external) is about reducing energy usage, their green energy efforts, tips to customers to reduce power use, apps and websites so they can monitor it, and currently, dynamic contracts so people can optimize their usage to when the price is lowest.
It's just so cynical.
[flagged]
I don’t personally want to do that, but I’m still interested in what I can learn about organizational design and culture from their success in their chosen field.
(I mean I get it: they are "good at making money" and "efficient" so you call it a "success" because that's what the capitalist society is pushing you to say / feel without asking yourself deeper questions)
Would you say that "heroin" is a success because it's very good at making people dependant?
You should probably use the term "they are very efficient at what they are doing" (descriptive) rather than "they are successful" (value judgment)
And then you should ask yourself: why are you praising efficiency for the sake of it?
And if you look further at the world, can't you see that efficiency and speed is actually one of our big issues? It's because we're over-efficient that we're consuming so much oil, decimating species, polluting our planet
If we were less efficient, sure we might have less stuff to play with (but who really cares?), but we would not be damaging our world so much
Perhaps you can take a few minutes to think deeply about it, and it might change your definition of "a success"
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…
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…
I know what you mean, but MrBeast cured 1000 people of (a form of) blindness, which is quite a benefit to humanity [1]. I would not be surprised if kids learn a bit of "kindness is good" from him. [1]: Of course among other things, but you can't deny he did quite some philanthropy
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>what does it bring the world, literally? I'm betting over 90% of what we do, collectively, really doesn't offer any true "value" to the world for however you're defining value. Which means that your measurement is bad because it's based on your opinion. Just like your comparison to Hitler. For supporters of Hitler, the things he did were amazing. But that was just their opinion.
At least we're not teaching kids to gamble and eat chocolate.