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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)

#681

Post by lnsru »

bmoxb wrote: post #661
lnsru wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am with you. YouTube does not offer math lectures about volume calculation. It advertises some fast food alike junk about insane things. And the 8 years old boys watch cartoons about chopped heads and how the dog plays with these heads. Afterwards I was happy, that I am luddite and YouTube is blocked at home and kids don’t have smartphones.

It absolutely does offer more maths lectures than you could ever conceivably watch.

They’re there. Hidden somewhere. I watched some of them. But you need to search for them. Like there is quality food I prepared for my workday today. But I must actively work on that and not take offered junk food.

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

#682

Post by CaptainFever »

alt227 wrote: post #625
lazzlazzlazz wrote: post #336

[flagged]

why?

Comments here are more about ranting about their negative opinions on Mr Beast and YouTube, instead of actually analysing this extremely interesting document and seeing what we can learn from it.

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

#684

Post by TeMPOraL »

bnralt wrote: post #622
tpmoney wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's the same impression I got. It's odd seeing the discussion veer off into morality, because most of it seems to be standard and non-problematic advice (IE, understanding what your product is and don't get distracted by focusing on what it's not). 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.

Is this really standard management advice? Half-way through the PDF I already felt like I'm reading some insane drivel of a sweatshop boss / wannabe cult leader. Whatever illusion I had that Mr Beast videos are worth watching, I lost it entirely, having learned that they're just a factory product with Mr Beast brand on it, a corporation pretending to be a person, optimized to waste people time[0], and made by people bullied into extremely unhealthy and antisocial behaviors.

Like, the part about making your co-workers feel like they're bottlenecking you; can't imagine working in an environment where everyone tries that number on everyone else. It's extremely adversarial. Is that really standard management advice? Maybe on Wall Street?

This source is pure gold: techniques to manipulate people into consuming your product - which they otherwise wouldn't be. All so you can make money on poisoning their minds (advertising, which is how you convert views to money). You can easily imagine this came out from a drug cartel boss, I'd expect the best and most ruthless one to operate just like that, with same level of cultishness.

And if that's who Mr Beast is, and that's how he thinks of other people - because believe it or not, viewers are other people too, not some cattle to be milked and slaughtered - then I'm glad I don't watch his videos. Not going to, and I'm happy to pass this document around to dissuade others from viewing his channel.

--

[0] - I mean, that's kind of obvious in anything social media, but rarely do you get it spelled out without any qualms.

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

#685

Post by glmbk »

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…

For the "sour grapes" metaphor to work the grapes need to be desired at first.

This isn't the case here. Most people do not want to be rich at any cost. I might feel some jealousy about Microsoft or wolfram.com, but not about a YouTuber whose massive team produces bland addictive videos, especially if YouTube is full of good videos if you know where to look.

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

#686

Post by wholinator2 »

lnsru wrote: post #534
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…

I am with you. YouTube does not offer math lectures about volume calculation. It advertises some fast food alike junk about insane things. And the 8 years old boys watch cartoons about chopped heads and how the dog plays with these heads. Afterwards I was happy, that I am luddite and YouTube is blocked at home and kids don’t have smartphones.

Youtube is the single most important and valuable learning tool that exists on the planet. There are lectures on literally everything, i have been recently learning my way into geometric algebra and lie theory for my physics phd. Sure, there's a lot of crap and youtube is just as happy to waste your time but if you search out and only watch educational content, your Frontpage will become educational content. It's hard to keep that way because there's tons of fun but uneducational things to watch, but there's browser extensions and things to help with that. Extensions that block the homepage and video recommendations, extensions that let you group your subscriptions and create your own feed. It can be amazing if you use it right, it's hard to use right sometimes

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

#687

Post by jorvi »

ocean_moist wrote: post #77

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…

I mean, there is also just hardcore survivorship bias at work here.

How much of the ongoing success is algorithmic / network capture?

You see this across all the “old” content networks like YouTube, Instagram and Twitch, that being well-known and putting out aggressively mediocre content trumps being a hidden gem with stellar content.

I dislike TikTok even more than the former, but one thing they do right is having the algorithm weight towards content. A great video by an unknown person is more likely to skyrocket and a mediocre video by a well-known person can easily bomb.

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

#688

Post by gabesullice »

cdchn wrote: post #396
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…

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.

> What did you think was well written about it?

I think it was well written because you could clearly hear his voice through the writing and empathize with his internal struggle with being in a position of authority while also feeling unqualified for the job.

> Did it provide any useful or unique insights?

As someone who has been very frustrated in the past by my perception of the inefficiency of communicating "up and over" instead of talking laterally to an engineer on another team, I thought he succinctly communicated why it's often necessary and helped me understand the value of that practice.

> The writing itself seemed terrible and riddled with spelling errors.

Orthography is only one aspect what makes writing good or bad. And a relatively less relevant one IMO.

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

#689

Post by doix »

There are lot of comments here disliking MrBeast and what not, but some of the advice can definitely apply to all organizations.

> Your goal here is to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible. That’s the number one goal of this production company. It’s not to make the best produced videos. Not to make the funniest videos. Not to make the best looking videos. Not the highest quality videos.. It’s to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible.

Replace "youtube videos" with whatever the company is trying to achieve. I see it all the time in large organizations, where different teams forget what the goal of the company is and instead get hyperfocused on their teams KPI's to the detriment of the company as a whole.

Lawyers finding problems and trying to stop things from happening instead of finding solutions. Security blocking things and not suggesting alternatives. IT blocking this or that instead of trying solve problems, etc.

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

#690

Post by ants_everywhere »

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…

> But, what's the alternative?

Personally, I find YouTube to be unusable if you think of it as channel-based. What I do is keep a list of topics and perform a search based on the topics.

That pulls in some set of videos, of which maybe about 20-50% are exactly what I want. If the search yields no great results, it's usually because I've gotten the search wrong or the topic isn't well covered on YouTube yet.

With the kids, I don't talk about watching "YouTube", I talk about watching "learning videos" and if they want to watch a learning video, I ask them to tell me what they want to learn before we turn the screens on.

Usually it's building something, like "I want to learn how to build a doll house" or "I want to learn how to make a shark sculpture

Channels are push content, this is more of a pull approach.

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