How to succeed in MrBeast production (Leaked PDF)

https://simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/15/how-to-succeed-in-mrbeast-production/

by babelfish • 2 years ago

2115 1251 2 years ago

Firerouge• 2 years ago

Any ideas what is being referenced with this quote?

Do not leave consteatants waiting in the sun (ideally waiting in general) for more than 3 hours. Squid game it cost us $500,000 and boys vs girls it got a lot of people out. Ask James to know more

jsheard• 2 years ago

Willing to Die for MrBeast (and $5 Million)

https://archive.is/lDVoz

walthamstow2• 2 years ago

He blames Crowdstrike for his org treating humans like shit for money. Nice.

al_borland• 2 years ago

“I Spent 50 Hours In Ketchup”

Mr Beast throwing out viral video ideas sounds like the Family Guy joke generator from South Park[0].

Doing a quick web search, it seems several people have made idea generators based off his formula.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTC9j0QpCBM

rootsudo2• 2 years ago

This is a great "leaked" pdf and honestly, shows the evolution (or degradtion) in media. Typical phrases, e.g. sign of the times, if it makes money of course it exists, etc etc but really it's great insight.

I personally don't/wouldn't do this, but I can't ignore the money making machine youtube has become / the producers of said videos.

hypeatei4• 2 years ago

So basically:

Come up with contrived BS that caters to younger audiences, micromanage anyone who is holding you up, and attempt to game a blackbox algorithm on a site you don't pay for (YouTube)

The whole modern social media / influencer sphere seems like a huge bubble that will pop eventually. Google has already started wiping inactive accounts[0] presumably because storage isn't truly infinite or cheap. I imagine YT will also take the same path eventually.

0: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/12418290?hl=en

j_maffe4• 2 years ago

How does it fall under the definition of a bubble? Sure, view counts contribute to more views. But that's not the main retention mechanism of these videos.

hypeatei4• 2 years ago

I see it as a bubble because they don't have to pay anything to host or publish content even though there is a cost there (storage, streaming, etc..) so they're essentially hoping that YT can keep providing a free service with ads even if they're running at a loss.

It's not clear if YouTube is specifically profitable, because Alphabet only separates revenue, not profit. But, I would imagine they're not running huge margins or even at a loss given their recent crackdown on ad-blockers and Google's overall fight against them with things like manifest V3.

postalrat• 2 years ago

When people realize they can spent a fraction of what they pay for advertising and get the same results.

ignoramous• 2 years ago

contrived BS ... micromanage ... game a blackbox algorithm

The relatively higher production cost warrants hyper optimization (as an org) and demands high agency (of producers).

younger audiences

Internet is so vast in that making something for the 0.1% is still an audience of millions.

userbinator3• 2 years ago

These influencers' accounts are certainly not inactive.

hypeatei4• 2 years ago

No, but the cracks are starting to show. My point is that YT may go down the same path and get stingy with video storage.

agos• 2 years ago

people who work in marketing/growth are already saying that influencer marketer rates have steeply declined. we can only hope!

worldsayshi4• 2 years ago

Here's to hoping but that could be caused by a number of things. High interest rates for example might make companies unwilling to invest in some types of marketing.

worldsayshi4• 2 years ago

I think it's easy to believe that something will eventually go away just because we feel that something is not good in some way. But things only go away if people change their behaviour around those things on mass.

There's a growing sentiment that a lot of social media is more bad than good for us. But people don't just stop with a behaviour that they know is bad for them. We need a lot more to change a behaviour that has become established.

guerrilla• 2 years ago

This is a good point. See alcohol and tobacco. People are smoking less though, aren't they?

tarsinge• 2 years ago

Yes, see the sugar industry. I find it quite similar how both use brain hacks. It makes behavior extremely hard to change once people are hooked.

hnpolicestate4• 2 years ago

Ever see Dhar Mann brainrot videos? I don't see it going anywhere. It's a big reason why films aren't good anymore. Content producers cater to the intellectual tastes of their respective societies. Long story short, we get what we deserve. Long live Criterion Collection for the handful of us who abstain from mass produced trash.

KPGv22• 2 years ago

There's plenty of good film and TV out there, and you don't even have to look hard to find it. I find this attitude to not just elitist but lazy and ignorant.

Unbefleckt• 2 years ago

I do get a sense of relief downloading a movie recommendation and being greeted by the Criterion logo.

CooCooCaCha4• 2 years ago

I, like many people, lamented about the media dumbing us down with lazy, brainless content. What blew my mind was when I read someone online respond to this assertion: “you have it backwards, the media is delivering what the market demands”.

As with most things it’s likely a bit of both. But deep down I suspect it’s mostly the market demanding trash.

jongjong• 2 years ago

This resonates. Movies lack depth nowadays, especially cultural depth.

They do sometimes convey interesting messages and they are well produced and captivating but they lack soul. I think about films like "Forest Gump". Personally, I really liked the film, maybe other people didn't like it as much but I found it to be unique and culturally enriching. I'm not even American but I could relate. Modern "movies" usually don't have enough character development; or if they do, it's highly generic. Any character development in modern movies is focused on making the character relatable to the most common denominator among the masses so they lack individuality.

It's even telling that we have separate words "film" and "movies". It reminds me of the book "Brave New World" which is set in the future; they have something called "Feelies" which is described as a complete visual and sensory experience but they don't teach you anything; they are all focused on very narrow physical experiences. Everything in BNW is designed in a way to reduce people's awareness and reduce diversity of thought to the point that they never think to ask certain questions.

mrkramer4• 2 years ago

Crazy ideas and sensationalism usually works in the showbiz and in the media industry. This is just applied to YouTube or in another words: Old wine in new bottle.

agumonkey• 2 years ago

there's something truly special about this era, we have so much comfort and "data" yet no one foresaw the enshittification of the web space even though it seems the exact same cycle that happen in any space.. when attention, fame and money gets involved .. most neurons are "working" at milking and abusing the mass. Same exact sleigh of hands really..

joshdavham3• 2 years ago

"contrived BS", "mircromanage", "game a blackbox algorithm"

Wow! There is a lot of bad faith in this comment. This is hacker news, not X, can you please be more thoughtful here?

zulban3• 2 years ago

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 but I still might learn about the business since it's so big.

abeyer2• 2 years ago

Maybe... but I read it more as (and tend to agree with) blow it off because it's explicitly an approach that makes the world a worse place in almost every way except perhaps your bank account balance. It's possible to be successful without being mercilessly amoral and there's a big difference between not personally caring for a product vs thinking a product is toxic and holding your nose anyway for the sake of a paycheck.

tshaddox• 2 years ago

Sure, there are different ways to be commercially successful and most probably require immense talent and hard work. Doesn’t really contradict any particular value judgment of the type of content he produces though.

debacle2• 2 years ago

His interviews are just another part of his business, and evidence shows that much of what he says during them is not factual.

oulipo12• 2 years ago

that's exactly the problem... why the fascination with "money" and "big"?

The world has real problems... called environmental collapse and climate change. Why not working on those

It's actually EASY to make money selling shit. It's HARD to solve a real problem to make everyone's lives better

brookst2• 2 years ago

I like your perspective but I don’t think liking coffee is the right comparison. It’s closer to reading a manual for a successful casino, where a lot of it is about manipulation rather than creating value. Obviously Mr. Beast isn’t as far out ethically as casinos, but IMO more in that direction than coffee tea preferences.

hypeatei4• 2 years ago

I read this post because I was curious about how these operations work. What I found is:

- Making good YOUTUBE videos is paramount, not quality videos

- Be quirky and crazy in videos using a blank check

- If something goes awry or you need it faster, also use a blank check

- Some advice related to thumbnails and titles (relying on YouTube's current algorithm which could change the next second)

The only thing I found semi useful is how he classifies employees using the A, B and C system (e.g. A is top tier, B can be trained to be top tier, and C is dead weight)

CooCooCaCha4• 2 years ago

The problem is our society teaches us to separate a thing from the externalities of the thing. If it really was just about learning then there wouldn’t be a problem. You can learn from anyone.

However, it’s not just about learning. People are easily influenced by the author of what they’re learning from. They’ll read a Steve Jobs autobiography and learn some interesting business insights, but also hold him in higher regard and perhaps feel like it’s ok to be a raging asshole. People look up to successful people.

It’s entirely appropriate to remind people that it’s not all sunshine and rainbows and perhaps this person has toxic effects they need to be aware of.

nialv7• 2 years ago

I don't like how much people tie success to the amount of money someone earns. (or how many views someone gets on YouTube, for that matter)

There are many people who I consider successful that have never earned 700 mil, and there are people who made billions I don't give a fuck about.

Nextgrid• 2 years ago

His comment has merit. The Beast business is fundamentally at the mercy of YouTube, the algorithm and their business priorities. In fact Beast's intentional focus on making the best YouTube videos highlights this. Beast is a high-touch content farm, but ultimately still a content farm and vulnerable to the exact same risks as any other one.

mattmaroon3• 2 years ago

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…

j4511• 2 years ago

Well said. It smells like some sour grapes in some of these comments.

Making videos that click and spread is clearly a skill or everyone would do it.

serjester• 2 years ago

Can you do better?

If 100's of millions of people are watching something, then clearly it has entertainment value.

His management philosophy might rub people the wrong way but it's hard to dispute it's effectiveness. Nor do you have to work there.

His success is all the more impressive given he started with nothing and how competitive the space is.

On some level he's the personification of the youtube algorithm - don't blame him, he's just giving people what they want. On some level this feels like the same outcry parents had to video games in the 90's.

mattnewton• 2 years ago

Not saying Mr. beast content isn’t valuable to millions of people, but I think “It makes money so it must be valuable” is a terrible benchmark.

It’s also the case that people can succeed in spite of their management philosophies. If you only look at the people who have made it you miss out on all the people who tried similar approaches and did not, which is needed to figure out the effectiveness of a strategy before adopting it. Classic example are people trying to be like Steve Jobs who are not successful.

And on the value side - There are a lot of exploitive ways to hook people, and you can think something is exploitive / a local minima, without being an elitist.

Mr. Beast specifically seems fine to me in a similar way that porn is fine. I don’t think it crosses over to exploitive, but I don’t think it’s crazy to make that argument and I don’t think people are primarily motivated by sour grapes or jealousy.

doe_eyes• 2 years ago

The whole modern social media / influencer sphere seems like a huge bubble that will pop eventually.

Before teenagers were looking up to YouTubers, they were looking up to TV celebs, musicians, sports players, and so on. You had entire publishing empires built around following such celebs around and reporting on their private lives.

I don't think this is hugely different. The tech has evolved and the formulas have been perfected, but it's still catering to the same obsessions and urges that we had for a good while.

bgun• 2 years ago

People like Mr. Beast have managed to discover psychological attention hacks that are not too dissimilar from sex or fear-based content (porn or a lot of political ads), but more insidious because it’s much more tame and “fun” on the surface.

And while I don’t think either can be made explicitly illegal without some pretty nasty second-order effects on freedom of expression, we can’t expect the likes of Google to provide a social fix here. Government will need to take note, label, and activate against this at some level. The TikTok ban means we’ve noticed this can be dangerous at least when rival nation-states are involved, but the call is coming from inside the house.

refulgentis3• 2 years ago

YouTube Shorts is really dark, there's stuff that makes David Foster Wallace's 1996 vision of people hyperglued to a TV look prescient instead of allegorical.

There are many, many, videos that are literally the adult version of baby videos -- ex. Squeezing rainbow colored Play-Doh through a sieve, really bizarre just pure visual attention hacking.

Your comment reminds me that's the local optima for YouTube x creators and it's just sort of contracting the work of actually producing content out. It doesn't care what it is. Just hours consumed.

The abuse of FOIA for police bodycam content published with light commentary... Zoom court sessions enabled turning judges into stars on a show they have no part of it...

j4511• 2 years ago

Online Advertising, and childrens videos have been doing it for a lot longer.

nitwit0052• 2 years ago

The flavor of the cotent is a bit different, but all media is like that. Look at a horror film, or romance novel. It's very clear what human urges/interests are being targetted.

Part of his strategy is copying TV. He famously made a Squid Game episode.

qwertytyyuu5• 2 years ago

Pretty sure TikTok’s vans were politically motivated

oulipo12• 2 years ago

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 interesting in any way... we should teach our kids to see through the bullshit, and ask to be less efficient, and more kind

simonw22• 2 years ago

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

brap• 2 years ago

Google wipes inactive accounts because they’re often used for spam and malware.

TMWNN2• 2 years ago

on a site you don't pay for (YouTube)

But MrBeast does pay. He pays for it with every video, because YouTube keeps 45% of the ad revenue for it. If he receives ~$300,000 for a video, YouTube has kept another ~$300,000.

tobyhinloopen2• 2 years ago

Social media / influencer sphere a bubble that’s going to pop? I… highly doubt that.

renewiltord• 2 years ago

On one side, an army of HN commenters: “Repeat after me. Don’t build on someone else’s platform.”

On the other side, Mr Beast:

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. Everything we want will come if we strive for that. Sounds obvious but after 6 months in the weeds a lot of people tend to forget what we are actually trying to achieve here.

sirspacey• 2 years ago

Yeah this hit hard for me as well.

I’ve studiously avoided building on platforms, but very different mindset to decided to be the best player on that platform.

Lesson learned: don’t make it about something else. Win the algo.

mistrial9• 2 years ago

Fine Arts would like a word with you

kelnos• 2 years ago

For every MrBeast there are tens (hundreds?) of thousands (millions?) you've never heard of. And for some of them, it's because the platform pulled the plug on them.

If someday YT decides to pull the plug on MrBeast, he might start singing a different tune. Or not, I mean, his millions and millions of dollars will probably make him feel better.

codexon• 2 years ago

Building on someone's platform is a gamble.

It paid off for Mr. Beast.

Maybe it will pay off for you, or maybe you will get banned before you make enough to retire or create another company. This is prime example of survivorship bias.

tpmoney14• 2 years ago

I read that as less about "building on someone else's platform" (though that's still a risk they're taking) and more a youtube / media content producer version of "perfect software doesn't pay the bills, shipping software does". I've known plenty of good developers that if they didn't have hard deadlines and people reminding them about what the real goal of the company is, would spend 6 months developing a perfect, provably correct PDF to JSON converter for reading any possible design of tables in all PDFs. Missing the fact that they only need to parse the tables in the CSV files that the vendors are sending us so we can invoice the customers.

That quote reads like its reminding people that youtube and a youtube production company job is not where you go to make art house silent films.

whywhywhywhy• 2 years ago

That quote reads like its reminding people that youtube and a youtube production company job is not where you go to make art house silent films.

It's more specific, a YouTube video is very different from a TikTok video or an Instagram video.

whizzter2• 2 years ago

There's a difference, video is probably transferrable to an extent (with their capital they could probably buy/launch beast-tube quickly and kids would follow).

Building your software to depend on Google API's and then be banned from Google would put you in deep trouble, building on Google systems but not relying on their API would still allow for an migration.

echelon• 2 years ago

YouTube is fine as a distribution channel for now. Though there is some risk of being extorted or losing access, the bigger threat will come some years down the road when video is a legacy distribution format.

Diffusion at the edge is going to change a lot of things. Especially since it won't have to encode to linear formats.

throw109207• 2 years ago

Is this supposed to be a gotcha of some kind? I don't see any point or value in this comment.

csallen• 2 years ago

Many people are so uncomfortable with risk that they publicly advocate (and personally live by) a policy of taking zero risk. Of course they also throw away the very real benefits that come packaged with many risks.

arder2• 2 years ago

Mr Beast videos do single digit millions in revenue per video, and he operates on razor thin margins re-investing everything. Youtube does $8.5Bn a quarter in revenue. For startups the target is the Youtube exit, not the Mr Beast exit. In fact, whilst Mr Beast is obviously doing a great job and making tonnes of money it's not clear if he even ever could exit. What Mr Beast is doing is incredibly successful, but it's not the silicon valley start up model.

yeukhon4• 2 years ago

You actually believe he makes razor thin profit? And you believes he reinvests everything? Sorry but none of us have verified his company’s books. Just saying

billy99k• 2 years ago

“Repeat after me. Don’t build on someone else’s platform.”

Initial growth on someone else's platform is a good idea. However, once you see some small success, it's best to think about diversifying. Mr. Beast has already done this. He's essentially his own brand now.

jack_riminton• 2 years ago

I was fully expecting to read a load of nonsense, but it chimes quite a lot with military training, which shouldn't actually be that surprising.

e.g. if someone is your bottleneck make them aware, give them a due date, check in regularly, in person comms is better than written etc.

smsm427• 2 years ago

“I Spent 50 Hours In Ketchup”
In general the more extreme the better.

I may be sounding like "get off my lawn" guy right now but should there be some realization that these people are a cultural analogue of if not heroin than at least cigarettes? They are making a good living from making things objectively worse in a society by tickling the base instincts of the addicts. I am not calling for government intervention or any of such BS but is it too much for me to expect at least some cultural pushback here?

smcl• 2 years ago

Maybe more "old man yells at cloud" but I am kinda with you in thinking it's trash. The thing is that every generation has had its own equivalent swill for kids, this one is no different. His channel won't last, there's too much baggage around it, but it'll get replaced with something equally trashy.

smsm427• 2 years ago

I have a lot of memories in my childhood, but I can't remember anything on this level. Sure, I grew up in a very different environment than the US, but even in the US - say, was there a constant stream of content aimed at kids that is optimized to be maximally extreme and maximally attention-grabbing? All I can remember was cartoons - but were kids spending hours glued to the screen watching cartoons? I surely wasn't.

sensanaty• 2 years ago

I'm only 26 and I'm also perhaps falling into the "old man yells at clouds" thing, but this feels different to me. Not Mr Beast by himself perhaps (never watched anything he's made), but just in general the kind of content that is being pushed to kids algorithmically is insane to me.

Watching my nephews grow up, I'm sort of gobsmacked about what my sisters are allowing them to watch. It's quite literally brainrot, I genuinely think what they watch is actively detrimental to their mental health and intelligence, especially since they're all below 10. It's just constant stimulation every single millisecond with no room to breathe, filled with random sound effects and noises constantly, while the "plot" is always some nonsensical crap.

The minecraft ones are the absolute worst for this, and to me the saddest thing is they'd rather watch some brainrotting machinima-style thing rather than play the damn game themselves.

As a side note, reading this comment back I'd like to formally apologize to my parents, because it seems I've turned into them and saying the exact same things they said about my hobbies :)

tqi• 2 years ago

I think it's worth reflecting on why you feel that way. I don't see how other people are spending their time is something I need to push back on...

juunpp• 2 years ago

I am not calling for government intervention or any of such BS

Why is this BS? It wouldn't be unheard of to pass stricter age restriction laws so that at least the kids are not so easily exposed to brain damage. Same thing with the drugs you mentioned.

mardifoufs• 2 years ago

Yes, but there's a difference between drugs and this. The lack of evidence that they are the same or even similar for example.

smsm427• 2 years ago

Why is this BS?

Because the cure would be way worse than the disease. Both parties don't have my best interest in mind, but only one party has the power to ruin my life. I am not inclined to add to that power any more that it is absolutely necessary. And we're so far beyond that point that any addition at this point is extremely suspect.

jrflowers7• 2 years ago

I like the idea that entertainment made for broad appeal is an existential threat to society worthy of comparison to drugs that kill hundreds of thousands of people per year. People have been appealing to the lowest common denominator for forever and yet the world soldiers on.

Your larger question of “why haven’t they made things I don’t personally find appealing illegal yet?” is worthy of exploration, though I don’t think many posters here are in a position to dig into it deeply for you

llamaimperative6• 2 years ago

Meh, we don't know what the counterfactual of a different media environment would be. For example, it seems not-even-crazy to believe that media's addictiveness has played a major role in sedentary lifestyles which in turn is a major contributor to several of the top causes-of-death in the developed world (far greater than drugs).

smsm427• 2 years ago

It's not just "broad appeal". Shakespeare plays were made for broad appeal (he was a professional playwright, after all). Mozart's music was made for the broad appeal. I see nothing wrong with the broad appeal. It's what this appeal is made to and how. Humans have a lot of ways to appeal to them, and this particular way of appealing targets very base very addictive psychological mechanisms that ultimately hurt the person - just like addictive substances do. They don't make the users better or smarter or calmer or anything like that - if anything, they make them dumber and more attention-deficient. That's my problem with it.

why haven’t they made things I don’t personally find appealing illegal yet

You are not good at reading, are you? I specifically said "I am not calling for government intervention or any of such BS" because I knew you are around and you are going to maliciously misunderstand me. But I guess the joke is on me since you didn't even bother to read that part.

jwells89• 2 years ago

Comparison to drugs is a bit extreme, but I think that some level of concern about MrBeast-style operations and the content they produce is warranted.

It’s not just broad appeal, but the mass reach of YouTube, the audience targeting and tight feedback loop it enables, and the resulting race to the bottom for who can make the most stupid and/or shocking videos, which in turn informs the tastes of the masses. Where does it end? Will it eventually get to the point that the only profitable YouTube channels are MrBeast-style because nothing else can bring in views?

barrell7• 2 years ago

How much societal progress has been killed from the amount of time spent watching Mr beast videos? How many potentially otherwise productive hours were wasted watching someone in ketchup? Obviously it’s not a 1:1 ratio, but it’s a valid question to ask.

Also he clearly states it shouldn’t be illegal. You should read posts more carefully before resorting to ad hominem attacks

tgsovlerkhgsel2• 2 years ago

Is it shallow entertainment? Sure.

But sometimes you want to eat a soggy kebap and not a Michelin-star gourmet meal, and that's fine too (and I can't stand people who malign what other people enjoy because it's "not pure enough").

smsm427• 2 years ago

Sometimes? Sure. All the time? You'd likely to hurt yourself pretty badly doing that, eventually (and maybe sooner than you'd realize). Nutrition-wise, I think, people starting to understand that. Information-wise, not so much.

throw109207• 2 years ago

I don't know what subculture you're living in, but in several of mine there absolutely is pushback against this, with people avoiding consuming this kind of content and trying to prevent their children from consuming it, too.

Now, the question why the larger US (or English-speaking) culture isn't uniformly doing the same is much more interesting, but there's no known reason for this and most of the common explanations are both somewhat political, and not backed up by much evidence, so discussion often degenerates to talking about why your theory is more plausible.

I wish we knew.

userbinator3• 2 years ago

IMHO it's quite divisive; there's a significant percentage of the population that's addicted to this sort of content, and there's another which actually finds it boring.

I've watched a few MrBeast videos and similar content, out of curiosity. It just does not appeal to me, in the same way that "influencer" content and celebrities don't.

kredd• 2 years ago

It's not English-speaking community specific. In every language I can speak, I can think of an equivalent of MrBeast for that area. Maybe a majority portion of the entire world's population actually enjoys that kind of content. Nobody in my friend group enjoys that, but looking at my nephews, they're all going crazy about it. There are going to be people who grew up with him for almost a decade, and that's a crazy amount of time to build parasocial relationship with your favourite celebrity.

moomoo11• 2 years ago

Most people are dumb because they are lazy and gave up long time ago. Their parents the same way, so the kids never had a chance. Like I had a house mate in my 20s. His parents just gave him everything. He busted his car, parents got him a new one. He lost his job and he just played call of duty all day and drank or smoke weed.

One day he asked me about programming and this dude just couldn’t sit still without needing a distraction.

He consumed all these meme videos and used to bug me by sending me brain rot.

Unfortunately this is the majority of people. I used to be poor so I lived like this in a house where 4-5 people shared the space.

They just cannot think because they gave up and it’s impossible to do anything for them.

On one hand I’m glad gig economy exists so it can keep people like him busy. I believe people like him would be dangerous if not provided a distraction.

I don’t understand how people don’t have curiousity to learn more. Instead they will waste time since kids just throwing all potential to waste playing games like COD or watching YT all day. It’s not even sad anymore just pathetic.

tpmoney14• 2 years ago

I get the feeling, but at the same time, this feels like normal culture gaps. I don't get "sponge bob square pants" but there are people out that that insist it was if not a pinnacle of animation entertainment, then a hugely creative and entertaining show that deserves its place in the pantheons of animation. And all those huge 80's era properties that so many have years of nostalgic memories of, like transformers, he-man or voltron were all "cynical cash grabs" and 30 minute commercials for toys. So much so the concerned parents of the time demanded the government step in. Now the jury might be out on whether that generation is worse than previous generations, but if they are I don't think it's going to be because transformers was a toy marketing gimmick instead of high art with a strong moral message.

Kids I know find all sorts of things ridiculously amusing and entertaining and it all seems stupid, brainless and mind rotting to me. But then again, the stuff I found ridiculously amusing and entertaining at that age was (I can attest, having gone back and watched some of it) was just as stupid, brainless and mind rotting. Some of it is not having a "sufficiently developed palette" for humor and entertainment. Some of it is because that humor and entertainment was genuinely new to me at the time, where as now I've seen it before so when it shows up in the kids stuff, it's not entertaining anymore. It's sort of the reverse of the "Seinfeld isn't funny" issue. We're not looking at something in the past and wondering why it was so great because it's been out shadowed by what it inspired. Instead we're looking at something from today and wondering why it's entertaining because we've been entertained in the same way in the past.

culebron21• 2 years ago

Can't agree more. 10 years ago I looked up transformers uploaded to YouTube, and they couldn't stand the nostalgia test. Plots are primitive, characters are flat. It made me actually recall that by 13 years, I started feeling little embarrassment watching them because of thqe plot itself.

Apart from that, what surprised me was that it had vibes of 1950s: watercolor still images, and the music score not with analog synths (that we'd expect from the '80-s), but a (small) orchestra with TRUMPETS leading. (This was the biggest '50s factor for me.)

helloplanets• 2 years ago

Wasn't Fear Factor this exact same concept already, twenty years ago?

kalleboo• 2 years ago

And just reality TV in general. His "Girls vs Boys" stunt is just a budget version of Big Brother, Survivor, etc.

j_timberlake2• 2 years ago

Most hobbies are just as dumb when you think about it.

Sports = watching grown men play with balls, Games = giving yourself unnecessary problems to solve, TV/Reading = learning (usually) completely useless information

FrozenSynapse2• 2 years ago

watching sports is entertaining as you're watching highly skilled individuals perform at the highest level + gives you a sense of belonging; games - entertainment and skill development, whether those are multiplayer games that teach you cooperation and competition, or single-player games that is fun and in a lot of cases learning (through lore), developing motor skills, strategic thinking and so on; tv/reading - learning (nothing is useless information, it helps create more connections in your brain);

yet, sitting in ketchup is brainrot content - 0 value

yard20104• 2 years ago

What do you mean unnecessary, I saved king Casimir twice, random people at the tavern are talking about it every single day.

DaoVeles6• 2 years ago

Maybe a little sprinkling of PT Barnum in there as well?

yard20104• 2 years ago

I am that get of my lawn guy, no shame. You are 100% correct and I do call for bs like government intervention, as the lesser evil, ofc. See what happened with tobacco. IMO it's the same.

wtk• 2 years ago

On another hand it's a point of turning for all those that dismiss it like yourselves. Maybe culture needs this so all "bad curiosities" are catered for, so it can serve as a base for more ambitious next steps.

podgorniy• 2 years ago

They are making a good living from making things objectively worse in a society by tickling the base instincts of the addicts

Looking at this phrase in isolation is such a fun. There are whole industries which work exactly like this (food, news, games, politics). These particular people aren't the cause, they are one of many many symptoms of the causes.

Causes are in rules, norms and incentives of the social and economical systems. We can't solve the problem at the leve at which it was created. These videomakers aren't even close to that level.

but is it too much for me to expect at least some cultural pushback here?

And they are getting it. Which is not enough for a change, as "benefits" they are getting are way greater. Main driving forces behind the phenomena is rooted somwhere else, not in space of scope this type of conversations (moral, value, human-centric or achievement-centric aspects).

tmoertel• 2 years ago

From the referenced doc:

CTR is basically how many people see our thumbnail in their feeds divided by how many that click it.

That's actually 1/CTR.

Another example of math fluency not being required for success at the top.

KPGv22• 2 years ago

whether you're looking for CTR on one end of the continuum or 1/CTR on the other end of the spectrum, you're looking at the same thing, just without understanding what one word means

smsm427• 2 years ago

I think it's a good example of understanding how people think is good for the success at the top. Out of 1000 people asking "Wtf is CTR now?" maybe one needs a precise definition usable for immediate conversion to the programming code. That's the person for whom CTR and 1/CTR difference is important. The other 999 need to understand what's this term is used to measure and where it comes from - and for them this explanation is just fine. They are not people who make decisions or calculations based on it - those already know what CTR is. They are random people that need to fit a new thing into their mental model - and they won't even notice the difference, especially given the followup explanation.

ajkjk2• 2 years ago

... Sounds like a person with plenty of fluency made a typo.

mrkramer4• 2 years ago

I respect his dedication and grind....I prefer more YouTube pop culture and YouTubers than TikTok and TikTokers. YouTube is so much better.

j_maffe4• 2 years ago

The grind to do what? Make an endless stream of shit content? Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma

talldayo4• 2 years ago

Trying to discern whether YouTube or TikTok influencers are better than the other is like picking which tooth you want pulled. Both are so gratingly painful even compared to normal cable television.

I have really no respect for the people that abuse a broken status quo to only improve their own personal standing. The fact that a lot of HNers seem to look up to Mr. Beast is almost as tellingly acerbic as the reliance on Steve Jobs for intelligent business quotes.

mrkramer4• 2 years ago

Both are so gratingly painful even compared to normal cable television.

This is the new type of cable television and it's free. Yea sure I pay it with my data but at least I don't need to spit out money every month to watch it.

I have really no respect for the people that abuse a broken status quo to only improve their own personal standing.

Again, entertainment on YouTube is free....even YouTube stopped bothering me to disable my ad-blocker so MrBeast is not getting a penny from me. I might buy YouTube Premium at some point in the future tho.

refibrillator• 2 years ago

Direct link to the PDF: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YaG9xpu-WQKBPUi8yQ4HaDYQLUS...

jesprenj2• 2 years ago

Or the actual PDF file instead of Google docs: http://splet.4a.si/dir/How-To-Succeed-At-MrBeast-Production....

jonathanyc• 2 years ago

I want you to look them in the eyes and tell them they are the bottleneck and take it a step further and explain why they are the bottleneck so you both are on the same page. “Tyler, you are my bottleneck. I have 45 days to make this video happen and I can not begin to work on it until I know what the contents of the video is. I need you to confirm you understand this is important and we need to set a date on when the creative will be done.” […] Every single day you must check in on Tyler and make sure he is still on track to hit the target date.

This sounds to me a lot like the idea in software engineering of being “blocked on” something. I wonder what jargon other fields use for the same concept. Could be cool to have a table cross-referencing jargon across fields, haha.

baxtr• 2 years ago

Are we sure this got “leaked”? Or is this merely part of the not leaked production PDF?

It will generate a ton of attention. Who cares if it’s bad?

simonw22• 2 years ago

As far as I can tell this was leaked to a person who’s been having a high profile disagreement with MrBeast, by either a current or former staff member.

Maybe it’s a fake or a deliberate release, but it doesn’t read like the at to me. There is a ton of commercially sensitive information in here. Not to mention that note about the expensive squid game incident which I doubt they would have included in a document for public consumption.

I don’t think MrBeast needs to farm for attention outside of his current very successful video tactics.

ants_everywhere3• 2 years ago

I don’t think MrBeast needs to farm for attention outside of his current very successful video tactics.

Well he is in the middle of a PR push responding to the claims from former employees that he fakes his videos and is generally fraudulent

latexr6• 2 years ago

Mr Beast’s company has been getting a ton of negative attention for how it works and how it treats employees and contestants. It seems plausible it was leaked as another example of toxic culture.

mewse-hn• 2 years ago

It was leaked with a lot of attention being paid to the "no doesn't necessarily mean no" section in the context of abuse at the MrBeast org

egorfine• 2 years ago

Since we are on the topic of communication, written communication also does not constitute communication unless they confirm they read it.

Excellent.

jellicle• 2 years ago

The bulk of content on Youtube today is some stock video footage, an AI-generated script read by a computer voice. Maybe a human spends a few minutes cutting together the video footage? But almost entirely automated spam designed to feed Youtube some pink slime and rake in the $.

Compared to that, Mr. Beast is fine art, worthy of the Louvre.

Zanni2• 2 years ago

Surprising reference to The Goal [1], which Mr. Beast "used to make everyone read ..." and still recommends. The Goal is a business novel about optimizing manufacturing processes for throughput and responsiveness rather than "efficiency" and is filled with counter-intuitive insights. Presenting it as a novel means you get to see characters grapple with these insights and fail to commit before truly understanding them. Excellent stuff, along the lines of The Phoenix Project [2], with which I assume many here are already familiar.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goal_(novel) [2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17255186-the-phoenix-pro...

llamaimperative6• 2 years ago

Theory of Constraints is fascinating because, as MrBeast points out here, it seems extremely obvious. I've had numerous interactions on this site where a person dismisses an insight from ToC as "obvious" and then 2 sentences later promulgates the exact type of intuition that ToC disproves.

Zanni2• 2 years ago

Yeah, this is the brilliance of the novel format. Someone presents an insight, and it can see obvious in isolation but then seems obviously wrong in context. "Of course we should favor throughput over efficiency" is obvious until you realize it means, for example, allowing idle time on incredibly expensive machines to favor responsiveness, which just seems wasteful.

In the novel, you get to see the characters bang their heads against these "paradoxes" again and again until it sinks in.

krrrh• 2 years ago

This sounds intriguing. Of note for anyone with an audible membership: The Goal is in the free library.

BryanLegend• 2 years ago

It's also included in Spotify Premium for free.

potatoman22• 2 years ago

Reading through the document, this company seems hellish for its employees. I wonder how the pay and perks are

qwertytyyuu5• 2 years ago

Spoken like a “c-player” haha. I’m with you though. It’s only for people who really very much enjoy working on the things he does.

TrackerFF2• 2 years ago

Seems like your average creative industry company, to be honest.

Underpaid, overworked, expectations of “total dedication”, for the off-chance that you can rise to the top or branching out.

joshdavham3• 2 years ago

I really liked his distinction between A, B and C-team players. This could be a really good framework for recruiting in an ambitious startup.

RandomThoughts3• 2 years ago

I personally deeply disliked the semi-cult like explanation that anyone moving out was basically not good enough to be there in the first place.

Apart from that, it's the good old Netflix playbook: empower managers to remove adequate team members with good severance to give space to good team members. The danger is letting it deteriorate into stack ranking if you are not careful with the deleterious effect on team work associated.

ilrwbwrkhv2• 2 years ago

[flagged]

dang5• 2 years ago

You can't post flamebait like this to HN, regardless of which country you have a problem with.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: it looks like we've been having to ask you to stop breaking the site guidelines for years:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39281820 (Feb 2024)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35656288 (April 2023)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34844518 (Feb 2023)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18585046 (Dec 2018)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18575831 (Dec 2018)

Continuing like this is eventually going to get your account banned. I don't want to ban you, so if you'd please review the rules and stick to them, that would be good.

guywithahat5• 2 years ago

I was thinking that too. It’s something you don’t hear much from YC but a lot of founders have similar corporate hiring policies.

null0pointer• 2 years ago

I hope everyone here who is praising the A, B, C-player framework recognizes that it comes from Jack Welch’s much criticized Vitality Curve system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve#Ratings

simonw22• 2 years ago

I don’t see much similarity here, other than the use of those three letters and the idea that Cs should be removed from the company.

The MrBeast As are rated on their ability to learn - which is surprisingly a characteristic that’s not mentioned in the Welch model.

MrBeast Bs are As who haven’t got there yet - Welch Bs are not expected to get there.

MrBeast Cs are reasonably capable but are missing out on that crucial learning instinct - again, not mentioned by Welch, who has Cs who are incompetent procrastinators.

rasengan• 2 years ago

Obligatory dogpack404 link [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/@DogPack404

kurisufag2• 2 years ago

who is dogpack404, and why is posting their links obligatory?

mtlmtlmtlmtl• 2 years ago

Dogpack404 is a former mrbeast employee currently exposing mrbeast for varying misconduct, such as faking his videos, running illegal lotteries through his videos, doing a crypto pump n dump, making fraudulent claims about his merch, inhumane treatment of contestants and harbouring multiple sex offenders at his company. The list goes on and Dogpack404 is not the only one currently exposing things like this, but is maybe the most prominent.

pockybum522• 2 years ago

This reminds me of how every corporation I've ever seen operates. Why is this strange or interesting?

simonw22• 2 years ago

Other corporations seriously have employee handbooks with sentences like this in?

“… instead of starting with his house in the circle that he would live in, we bring it in on a crane 30 seconds into the video. Why? Because who the fuck else on Youtube can do that lol.”

wongarsu• 2 years ago

They identified something their customers (viewers) like and the competition can't provide, and play to that unique strength. That's pretty standard, they just give an example instead of obfuscating the principle in management speak.

With some rewording this would be perfect for the USP slide of an investor deck

tpmoney14• 2 years ago

They do, but usually you'll find it worded something like "Deliver high value, seamless and synerginized entertainment that frontalizes our strengths and inspires diverse modalities of consumer satisfaction"

saylisteins• 2 years ago

The valve handbook is an interesting read as well, it's very different, but in a way very similar.

Link: https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/apps/valve/Valve_NewEmplo...

GaggiX2• 2 years ago

Mr.Beast is in some big controversies right now, and it's honestly much more interesting than this PDF, I expected to see the "no does not mean no" section in this PDF.

_cenw• 2 years ago

It's there, on page 19.

simonw22• 2 years ago

I think this document predates the current scandal - the page 19 reference is to https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/02/style/mrbeast-beast-games... where the more recent scandal is https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna164777

(Sorry, my mistake: the page 19 bit is indeed “no does not mean no” which is unfortunate wording given a current scandal! The scandal I referred to is the one about leaving contestants in the sun for three+ hours)

GaggiX2• 2 years ago

I wonder why it wasn't mentioned in the article.

albrewer• 2 years ago

If you read the content of the PDF instead of focusing on the problematic wording of the section title, you'll see that he doesn't mean it in a personal boundary context, but in a problem solving / sales context. Most people's default answer to ideas that are totally new to them is "no" and accepting that first no on its face means you don't get to achieve your goal.

ttepasse2• 2 years ago

The unwavering fixation on metrics like Click Thru Rate, Average View Duration and Average View Percentage explains why so many of my previous channels get formulaic over time. It sounds like a small thing, but for some reason the thumbnails/titles with the Youtube face enrage me the most.

Thankfully there are still enough channels which are not that optimized.

But I wonder: How would the scene of Youtubers cope, if Youtube suddenly changes its algorithm to something completely different? I remember the tears in SEO-land, when Google did it.

throw109207• 2 years ago

There's a disincentive for YouTube to change because it'd make both creators (to a greater extent) and users (to a lesser extent) unhappy.

It's almost like the situation of buggy hardware implementations of networking protocols being so prevalent that software has to adapt to it, and vice versa, leading to lots of silly non-compliant (or non-optimal) behavior because it's disadvantageous to fix your behavior before upstream/downstream fixes theirs.

I think the better ways to fix this would be either gradual change, carefully-crafted regulation, or a new platform entirely that's not owned by an ad company.

db48x2• 2 years ago

There are various browser extensions that you might like. Clickbait Remover for Youtube, DeArrow, etc. They remove the thumbnail images and replace them with a frame from a random time within the video, and replace or modify the video title to make it less sensational. I also recommend Sponsorblock.

ttepasse2• 2 years ago

I'm using an even more nerdier variant: Subscribing via RSS feeds, then downloading as MP4s.

Having a small backlog of video files in the file system shows how great file systems are compared to a subscription feed on a web site: You can pick and choose your next video, you can sort by different criteria, you can tag then and/or put them into folders and you can do that all one the fly.

ocean_moist5• 2 years ago

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 easy in that sense, but KPIs still matter.

2. Hiring only A-players. Bloated teams kill startups.

3. Building value > making money

4. Rewarding employees who make value for the business and think like founders/equity owners, not employees.

5. Understanding that some videos only his team can do, and actively exploiting and widening that gap.

The management/communication stuff is mostly about working on set/dealing with physical scale. You need a lot more hands dealing with logistics, which requires hardline communication and management. In startups, the team is usually really lean and technical, so management becomes more straightforward.

I am also getting some bad culture vibes from the PDF and really dislike the writing style. I think it's important not to micromanage to the extent he is--it's necessary, maybe, for his business. Not for startups. Interesting perspective, reminds me of a chef de cuisine in a cutthroat 90s kitchen. The dishes (videos) have to be perfect, they require a lot of prep and a lot of hands, and you have to consistently pump them out.

simonw22• 2 years ago

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 chosen culture contributed to their enormous success in that market? There’s no way to know that, but my hunch is it contributed quite a bit.

j4511• 2 years ago

First time entrepreneurs are also learning how to build culture. No excuse, but still.

next_xibalba4• 2 years ago

How much has that specific chosen culture contributed to their enormous success in that market?

You see this across industries. Even Google, in the early days, was people working crazy hours, sweating the details, and just generally grinding. It is something like a law of nature that extraordinary results require extraordinary effort from extraordinary people.

greesil3• 2 years ago

At face value, this is not a culture that would reward risk taking. It's very operations focused. Get x done on day y or you're fired. Maybe they do value risk taking on the creative side?

nrp• 2 years ago

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).

tpmoney14• 2 years ago

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 Microsoft or Google documents to a bunch of long time IBM folks they would have thought the same things I'm sure. The tone might be different, but most of the points seem identical to stuff anyone should be familiar with. "Follow up when you ask someone for something", "Don't commit to giving X if you can't actually get X", "Have a backup plan", "Try to turn a failure into something useful", "Own your mistakes", "Make sure you've exhausted all the avenues for something before you decide it's impossible", "Do the hard work early so you're not cramming it all in at the end", "You are the subject matter expert on your specific project, assume everyone else doesn't know anything". Even the "A,B,C" employee thing is pretty standard stuff folks know intuitively. Fast food is garbage no matter where you go, yet somehow Chick Fil A has lines around the block at lunch time and if there's 3 cars in a Wendy's drive through, you'll go somewhere else. Why? Because Chick Fil A really tries to not have "C" employees (relative to fast food employees in general), and it shows in the customer experience. Two fast food places can have the same quality of food, and the one with the drive through attendant that acknowledges people and responds to phatic phrases, and marks the diet soda cup is going to have more traffic and customer satisfaction than the one where the attendant barely acknowledges you've arrived at the window and leaves you to figure out which was the diet coke when you get home.

grecy3• 2 years ago

I think it's important not to micromanage to the extent he is--it's necessary, maybe, for his business

I think it's pretty clear he has figured out how to "master" YouTube better than anyone else ever has by a very wide margin.

So if he doesn't micromanage, how can he teach people how to do something that nobody else has ever figured out how to do?

It's not like people will show up and be good at what he wants. There is no school for this, no "Here's my past experience". None of that matters at his level of success.

FrozenSynapse2• 2 years ago

I think it's pretty clear he has figured out how to "master" YouTube better than anyone else ever has by a very wide margin.

content for dumb kids

fabianhjr• 2 years ago

4. Rewarding employees who make value for the business and think like founders/equity owners, not employees.

That is simple to do but not something many companies want to do. Just give employees equity via mutualisation. (Real ownership not discourse ownership)

wahnfrieden2• 2 years ago

There’s a difference between writing down that you hire A-players in a document, and hiring the unqualified personal friends that he does in practice for all kinds of production roles

sumedh• 2 years ago

and hiring the unqualified personal friends that he does in practice for all kinds of production roles

How do you know they are unqualified?

threeseed• 2 years ago

I always love the "just hire A-players" line.

As though startups are trying to hire mediocre people instead of having no choice.

And that 95% of startups don't know their metrics. Pretty sure almost all do but again don't have the skills or resources to meaningfully move them.

kjksf• 2 years ago

It's more about willing to fire below-A players quickly rather than having a perfect hiring filter that only lets A players in.

Looking back at 7 companies I worked at: they all had a tough hiring filter to get in. But most of them also had not that great people that they were not firing.

Firing people is hard even when you know you should do it. You have to be a heartless bastard to not have a problem firing people.

It's even worse when the company gets so big that a game of building empires starts in which case managers have an incentive to grow headcount to grow power, even if that headcount isn't very good.

The document even talks about what MrBeast considers a B-player.

Made a mistake once? That's fine. Fuck ups are a price of ambition.

Made the same mistake twice? Need to be told the same thing multiple times? Not an A player so fired.

DaoVeles6• 2 years ago

It does come from a point of privileged. Steve jobs said "A players hire A+ players. A+ players hire A++ players". That was because he saw A players hiring B players. B Players will hire C players - and so on.

That is all well and good when you are the golden goose that is Apple. Most people just do not get the opportunity to hire like that.

ocean_moist5• 2 years ago

I always love the "just hire A-players" line. As though startups are trying to hire mediocre people instead of having no choice.

If a startup can't attract talent (a sign of bad traction), that startup probably is not that good and more people won't solve the underlying problem. You would also be surprised how many startups outsource dev/marketing/etc. in their initial stages.

If you can't convince smart people to work for you and that your idea is good, good luck trying to convince customers of the same.

And that 95% of startups don't know their metrics. Pretty sure almost all do but again don't have the skills or resources to meaningfully move them.

I said most don't know them as well as Mr. Beast. Read "Chapter 1: What makes a Youtube video viral?". Most founders have not put the same amount of time into seeing how to track, measure, and impact metrics. He identified key KPIs and then experimented with changes until he found what worked. His whole north star to, minute by minute, structure each video, is informed by the KPIs. His whole strategy is built upon metrics by metrics.

He clearly is obsessed with them to a degree few are. Some startups don't even know how much money they make, how much money they lose, etc.

nfw22• 2 years ago

I’ve seen multiple teams hire mediocre people despite having a choice. Usually it is because either:

- they believe velocity is simply additive (A player + B player > A player)

- they look too much into credentials (big name school / employer) and do not adequately vet ability

- they start with the attitude “let’s give this person a chance and see if they work out” and become too reluctant to fire when they turn out mediocre.

Teams should be more comfortable staying small longer in my opinion.

aa-jv• 2 years ago

trying to hire mediocre people

It should be "always retain A-players". You can hire as many ABC's as you like - some of those C's will become B's and A's, and some of the B's will become A's, and the rest .. you let go with severance.

Thats the free market, baby. Live with it, or perish.

deelowe• 2 years ago

Having recently switched jobs, I was again reminded of just how terrible most interviewers are. The more senior the interviewer, the more terrible.

sage76• 2 years ago

I am hearing this stuff from bigger companies too now. By definition, everyone cannot hire A players.

__turbobrew__3• 2 years ago

Startups usually have no choice, they cannot afford A players. There are businesses which do hire A-players such as OpenAI, Jane Street, Netflix, etc. but A players require A compensation.

OJFord2• 2 years ago

As though startups are trying to hire mediocre people instead of having no choice.

Well one choice you might make is to hire some number of 'mediocre people' instead of one 'A-player'; the ratio of more junior to more senior; etc.

XorNot2• 2 years ago

2. Hiring only A-players. Bloated teams kill startups.

"Just hire good employees, why did no one think of this before!"

...seriously?

inemesitaffia• 2 years ago

Good by what measure?

caseyy• 2 years ago

can't deny the success

I don’t disagree that there is some value in this knowledge. But success has different definitions.

I do not consider Jimmy successful. In relation to classical virtues, he hasn’t truly lived up to many. That would be success to me.

He is popular and his business is rich. Some people consider that success, but not all. Not even in business and start-up circles.

Edit: some people below (quite remarkably) miss the point despite me having spelled it out — “success has different definitions”. Somehow they have convinced themselves I said that Jimmy has my definition of success, or that he is not successful by his own definition. I think everyone who wants to understand what I am saying does. If not, I repeat one more time — there is more than one way to measure success. Which is correct or not correct — I do not prescribe. That is all :)

paulcole8• 2 years ago

But success has different definitions.

Yes, except doesn’t Mr. Beast define the kind of success he’s aiming for in the PDF?

I do not consider Jimmy successful.

By the definition he set for success or the one you made up?

simonw22• 2 years ago

In this profile from 2022 Jimmy said his goal was to become the number one YouTube channel: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/mrbeas...

According to this Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-subscribed_YouTub... he finally achieved that goal on June 2, 2024.

So definitely successful by his own chosen metric.

daedrdev2• 2 years ago

I do not consider Jimmy successful. In relation to classical virtues, he hasn’t truly lived up to many. That would be success to me.

He was a tiny YouTuber 6 years ago with under a million subscribers, and has become the biggest despite tens of thousands of competitors who were better placed than him. The difference between just a few short years ago and now is what impresses me and makes me consider him a success, he has gone from a one man show counting numbers in his room to a million to the biggest on the platform with many other ventures.

thewicked• 2 years ago

Seems like a version of not counting points and giving all the kids a gold medal. It's pink and fluffy.

kumarvvr3• 2 years ago

Success, but at what cost is more important, for those who are evaluating success.

A coal power plant may be enormously successful. But its costs to climate are equally important.

We often fail to talk about the other side of the coin.

lxgr4• 2 years ago

Is anyone seriously denying the success?

What's definitely a valid target of criticism are the methods, though.

zx10rse• 2 years ago

SBF was very successful too.

yard20104• 2 years ago

That's gross. IMHO, ofc. A bit like scientology or crusade-age Christianity, you know it's wrong, but you can't argue with the success, so y not?

amne• 2 years ago

Just like you can't argue about a lion eating a gazelle keeping the lion alive. Some people think it's gross but the lion is alive and ready to hunt again.

calmbonsai6• 2 years ago

Re-read those operational principles out loud. Now imagine them being executed at-scale by a fraudulent enterprise to the net detriment of society.

You don't have to imagine very hard.

nothercastle17• 2 years ago

So most tech startups?

oulipo12• 2 years ago

A lot of people here (and in tech in general) are conflating "being efficient" with "having success"...

that's clearly because people in tech generally value efficiency

but we have to take a step back collectively and understand that "being efficient at producing addictive video for teens to sell ads for shit they don't need" is BAD, not a "success"

cdrini• 2 years ago

I don't think it has anything to do with efficiency, but with effectivity. You could argue producing addictive videos for teens is Mr beasts goal. And he is very effective at doing that. And actually yes, successful at that goal.

Success doesn't really have a moral component, it's relative to the stated goal. You could argue it's not meaningful or moral or worthwhile or valuable, but you can't deny that he has achieved success.

So the thing you can take away from someone like mr beast is "what made them so effective?". A lot of his strategies could be useful for other, more worthwhile goals than his! So there's something that can be learned. I think that's what people mean, not that "people in tech generally value efficiency".

robertlagrant• 2 years ago

that's clearly because people in tech generally value efficiency

I think this is you reading this into the comment. They don't mention efficiency.

chii3• 2 years ago

is BAD, not a "success"

that is your moral view or value. It is not a universal value.

Economic success is indeed a thing, and it can be discussed separately from moralityl.

refurb3• 2 years ago

but we have to take a step back collectively and understand that "being efficient at producing addictive video for teens to sell ads for shit they don't need" is BAD, not a "success"

That’s seems like a judgement call and a personal one at that. It certainly isn’t a universal value among humanity.

Which is fine, but a 500+ comment HN post where people argue over personal values doesn’t make for interesting reading.

meowface4• 2 years ago

If 100% of his watchers were YouTube Premium subscribers and none of them ever saw an ad, would you feel differently?

lupusreal• 2 years ago

Literally nobody is denying that MrBeast is successful so what is the point of saying that nobody can deny it?

jorvi• 2 years ago

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.

spencerchubb• 2 years ago

I read the entire document and I don't understand where you saw bad culture or micromanaging.

Some people may not like the fact that they pull all nighters, but that's a matter of opinion. Clearly some people do like the terms of employment, otherwise they wouldn't work there.

smt882• 2 years ago

Clearly some people do like the terms of employment, otherwise they wouldn't work there.

This is a deeply naive understanding of employment.

Almost no one has a huge array of job opportunities, and they can select the one they want based on company culture.

Most people have one viable job offer at a time, and they have to work hard for it. This is even more true in entertainment fields. Many people in entertainment feel lucky to be a paid employee at all, and they can't choose between a job that requires all-nighters and one that doesn't.

gwbas1c2• 2 years ago

where you saw bad culture or micromanaging

Mr. Beast is ultimately the star of the video, so he has to micromanage at some point or another. That's his brand. He can't let his employees plan a video that he won't like.

I did find the comments about all-nighters off-putting... And I personally don't like working on multiple things at the same time. But that's personal preference; I don't particularly like Mr. Beast's videos, so I don't see myself working for his company any time soon.

I'm more concerned about Mr. Beast overextending himself. With Mr. Beast (the person) being the brand and the star, I don't think he can scale himself much more.

ocean_moist5• 2 years ago

bad culture

The let "let boys be childish" part and the overall psuedo-human tone kind of alarmed me. The random "hahas" littered around, seemed like a robot trying to be a human.

micromanaging

He has a playbook/formula that works and all employees are solely focused on executing that vision. People have little operational ownership. In other words, employees don't have freedom in vision.

I even said it probably is necessary for the success of his business that employees don't have that freedom. I just would not enjoy working in a environment like that and I think employees (especially early ones) need to have that kind of operational freedom in startups (which is the context of my comment).

evilfred• 2 years ago

literally everyone says they only hire A-players. Beast hired someone now accused of sexting with teens. is that an A-player hire?

fabioborellini• 2 years ago

Maybe the subheading “no does not mean no” can be also taken literally.

Wolfenstein98k8• 2 years ago

Unfortunately, the person he'd hired to predict the future was not a A-player.

marxisttemp• 2 years ago

Rewarding employees who make value for the business and think like founders/equity owners, not employees.

The best way to get employees to think like equity owners is to give them equity. But I guess the name of the game in our times is to somehow expect people with no equity to work even harder for the company than the equity holders do, right? Let me know how that works out.

Wolfenstein98k8• 2 years ago

Pretty well so far

ocean_moist5• 2 years ago

I personally think (and I think the prevailing sentiment is) that giving early employees equity is crucial. There is no way I would do any work for an early stage startup (or, in general, if I can help it) with no stake in the company.

In bigger companies, it's a zero sum game. They don't really care about you because their scale makes it hard to identify who cares for them, so everything is just a business transaction.

darby_nine8• 2 years ago

Lot of people critiquing this, but you can't deny the success.

Presumably the issue is not the result but rather the means and cost. The practice of justifying the means with the ends is famously behavior most people try to avoid sharing a society with and, in fact, behavior people generally try to end once discovering.

EDIT: To be sure, employees could be quite happy there and there's little negativity to discuss—but the tone in the above post raised concerns.

FactKnower692• 2 years ago

2. Hiring only A-players. Bloated teams kill startups.

I love coming on here and seeing the world's wealthiest and savviest tech magnates breathlessly murmuring in awe amongst themselves about such unprecedented tidbits of genius business acumen as "only hire good workers; don't hire bad workers"

Wolfenstein98k8• 2 years ago

He gives clear and actionable definitions, which is what makes it remarkable and different to everyone else saying or implying what you wrote.

You can't strip out the valuable content from a sentence and then claim it was always identical to valueless sentences.

johnnyanmac17• 2 years ago

And as all the past 2 months show, you don't get to this level of success without exploiting, if not outright abusing, your labor.

I am willing to bet he knows his metrics better than >95% of startup founders.

Id bet so too. Becuase he's definitely rich enough even pre-youtbe to just find a YT contact and ask about the metrics, on top of studying his market. Very few startups get such objective data.

Hiring only A-players. Bloated teams kill startups.

It really depends on your stage of scale. You don't need 100 A-players once you start expanding the app. And it benefits to train younger workers on your systems as your older ones start to move on, retire, or die.

dayvid2• 2 years ago

This is actually a really good document for someone who is a junior or assistant. I've worked a variety of jobs and didn't get much documents on training like this, mostly compliance stuff. You could take a lot of it out and get good points on managing people and taking ownership for tasks. It seems redundant or basic, but a lot of these things aren't explicitly mentioned, usually informally only.

paulryanrogers5• 2 years ago

It is nice to see the red flags in writing ahead of time. After all "boys will be boys"

dayvid2• 2 years ago

That’s there, but the parts about taking responsibility for your work, keeping people you delegate work to accountable and negotiating with vendors and being persistent is stuff you usually get informally.

I also find those signs that it’s a more honest document. Most things publicly available are so neutered there’s not much useful grey info

TrackerFF2• 2 years ago

You are correct. There are way too many assistant roles in the creative industry that come with little to none real job training, just “watch what I do, or do as I tell, and never make a mistake twice or you’re toast”.

I think it’s due to the sheer amount of candidates, and the total power some superiors have over you.

It’s a sink or swim strategy, but you’re also swimming with sharks.

xrd• 2 years ago

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 inside MrBeast's orbit. And, he's not putting out as much content.

What are the good channels that create creative and stimulating videos that are a benefit to humanity.

Does YouTube kill those channels?

debacle2• 2 years ago

I had to buy goddamn chocolate bars at Walmart because of him.

Nah, you didn't. You're the parent, if you don't like the content, don't let your kids watch it.

np_tedious2• 2 years ago

Idk much about him but stacking school busses on top of each other with a crane or driving a train into a sinkhole seem like pretty interesting things to do. Better than geeking out over the bloodiest Mortal Kombat fatality or whatever I was doing at that age. What's an example of the more "crap" content?

bondarchuk3• 2 years ago

Why watch youtube at all? It's not obligatory.

maltalex• 2 years ago

But, what's the alternative?

Good question. I'm also on the lookout for quality content for my kids. I recently learned that YouTube Kids can be put into whitelist-only mode, and that specific channels, videos, or collections of channels can be picked individually. Google aren't making it easy, but the option is there.

Does YouTube kill those channels?

I don't think it's about YouTube. Mr Beast is good at what he does, and manages to produce very marketable content. It's fast-food entertainment. It's a newer take on what's been on our TV screens for decades in the form of reality TV and game shows.

ChiefNotAClue• 2 years ago

It doesn't kill them per se, but it doesn't seem to promote them either. The good content takes a lot more digging to find. Not an easy task, considering how bad the search on YouTube is.

redox99• 2 years ago

I don't think buying some chocolate bars is such a big deal. Just like buying some Mickey Mouse toy or sticker is fine.

And nothing wrong with some entertainment videos, some leisure is good. It doesn't need to be all educational.

cynicalsecurity• 2 years ago

An alternative would be to use YouTube Kids instead of a regular YouTube and to ban MrBeast's channel. Problems solved.

Jun8• 2 years ago

Try Vihart on YT, eg this one is one of the most awesome explanations I’ve seen: https://youtu.be/VIVIegSt81k?si=yRlWlEf2-rEICgtk. And kids love this stuff.

userbinator3• 2 years ago

good channels that create creative and stimulating videos that are a benefit to humanity

Restoration and repair videos could be a good choice, although there's also plenty of fake clickbait content there too now. I usually actively avoid content with sensationalised titles and look for smaller non-profit creators.

saltcod• 2 years ago

We successfully moved to restoration videos. They’re great. Agreed with everything said about both Mr Beast and Mark Rober. Not what I want my kids watching a lot of.

raydev• 2 years ago

The funny thing about those chocolate bars is that (I think) they're better than the century old brand names they're competing with.

guywithahat5• 2 years ago

I know this is beside the point but I remember the first time I bought a Mr Beast bar, I bit into it, and realized their standard bar was actually a pretty dark chocolate. I think they changed the labeling but I imagine there must have been a lot of kids who bought the candy bar and hated it lol

Barrin92• 2 years ago

But, what's the alternative?

The alternative is grabbing The Little Prince or My Neighbor Totoro and watching or reading it with the kids. I have a very simple rule, if something isn't good enough to be engaging for parents and kids just throw it the hell out. It reminds me of a discussion between a Japanese coworker and an American expat. The Japanese guy was disgusted by lunchables, and the expat went "oh yeah, they're just for kids", and he just said "you feed your kids something you wouldn't eat yourself"?

Stop normalizing feeding garbage to children, metaphorically or literally. There's enough stimulating media in the world outside of Youtube.

loughnane• 2 years ago

i don't know of many, but I've got kids in a similar range and I endorse Kurzgesagt. CGP Grey hits nice sometimes too (they loved the flags, hexagons, and dragon videos)

pnathan• 2 years ago

But, what's the alternative?

Ban YouTube. Have only 1 movie/TV night.

Mandate books as primary entertainment.

Stock the home library with classic tales of heroism and adventure. Own an encyclopedia set.

Reject the brainshinker system and look to works of more enduring worth.

Videos should be thoughtful. If that's not possible in the family dynamic, shut it down.

dyauspitr• 2 years ago

People might downvote this but it’s what our family is doing. We barely watch any TV and do t spend a lot of time on screens. We have a lot of books and entertainment for my kids is primarily through reading physical books, sports, hanging out with friends in their backyard etc.

lostdog• 2 years ago

Tell your kids they have to perform a challenge worthy of getting the chocolate bars.

kumarvvr3• 2 years ago

But, what's the alternative?

Avoiding one sided content altogether. Any and all video content must be rejected.

Learning to do things from books is the only way we can safeguard the next generation from becoming mind fucked zombies who have lost the cognitive ability to think for themselves.

HKH2• 2 years ago

What are the good channels that create creative and stimulating videos that are a benefit to humanity.

Kurzgesagt doesn't have daily videos, but it fits that bill.

chevman• 2 years ago

The whole youtube/streaming/advertiser/influencer/product pusher ecosystem is complete shit for kids and, to a degree, adults.

We have a 10 year old son and best approach we have found is VLC on his ipad and family TV, coupled to a NAS that we drop the content on to (downloaded/ripped shows that contain no ads).

runeblaze2• 2 years ago

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

someothherguyy6• 2 years ago

Or that signaling altruism saves the obscenely wealthy from criticism, which is a popular cynical take on the utility of philanthropy.

phito2• 2 years ago

Thinking that kindness content is good is naive. It is exploitative and usually what people get from it is "it could happen to me" rather than "I could help others".

shirro• 2 years ago

My kids have a lot (probably too much) screen time. None of them watch Mr Beast. I think he is recommended to people who don't have well developed Youtube histories. He is sort of the Taylor Swift of Youtube. She might be a fine musician for all I know but no music service is going to recommend her to a listener it knows wants metal. Beast is a safe recommendation for people who only have a casual interest in what the platform has to offer. He never appears in my recommendations. The algorithm knows better.

We watched Youtube together as a family at first and when the kids got older I helped them find creators and setup their own subscriptions. The worst thing a parent can do is sit them in front of Youtube Kids brainrot. They started with lots of education,science,maker/craft,animation and PG gamers like Hermitcraft.

ants_everywhere3• 2 years ago

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.

BrenBarn5• 2 years ago

Yeah, I sometimes think that the shift to "push content" is the underlying problem here.

prmoustache2• 2 years ago

I had to buy goddamn chocolate bars at Walmart because of him.

No you didn't. You chose to do so.

yeukhon4• 2 years ago

I like Practical Engineering. I also watch a lot of quality family vblog. You can tell genuine content vs influencer contents I am sure

Mark Rober has turned into very content-driven since a few years ago. He used to spend more time on explaining how the science works. His “toys” are also copycat from existing competitors

0x1ceb00da• 2 years ago

Face full of eyes makes long form video essays analysing video games.

https://m.youtube.com/@FaceFullofEyes

m3kw92• 2 years ago

I see a lot of hating on mr beast for being so mechanical in driving views but blame the game, not the player

paulryanrogers5• 2 years ago

Doesn't excuse knowingly encouraging kids to gamble and covering for SA, or selling unhealthy chocolate bars to kids under the guise of health food.

mhh__• 2 years ago

MrBeast's videos are total slop that I would put serious effort towards preventing my children watching if I had some but reading this it's immediately obvious why he's successful.

bondarchuk3• 2 years ago

Some dramatic takes in this thread. Is watching a mr Beast video really that much worse than watching Friends or Spongebob or Game of Thrones?

kurisufag2• 2 years ago

never saw GoT, but I wouldn't think so. you put an episode on and all of a sudden half an hour has passed.

all these things are just convenient timeskip tools.

dcchambers4• 2 years ago

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.

shombaboor• 2 years ago

yeah i thought that was interesting, as if to say, if we made a pet torture video that has the most views ever, that's what's important. Also how wedded it is to youtube. understanding how youtube works is more important that making funny or engaging content. it's a reverse of 'if you build it they will come' when it comes to excellence.

yunwal2• 2 years ago

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?

chidog122• 2 years ago

that's a ridiculous take and blinded by your own preferences... It's all content... and it's all trying to get "Eyes on content. For a long as possible."

dbbk2• 2 years ago

I'm not sure I agree. I don't watch his content but from reading the document it's quite clear his goal is to make stuff that's "fucken funny" - he's not creating any content for the sake of it, he wants to entertain himself.

shalmanese2• 2 years ago

This, fr, is a better explication of "founder mode" than anything pg & co have put out about it so far.

alphazard• 2 years ago

The bit about A, B, and C players is good.

I had been thinking about this as learning ability (fluid intelligence) and institutional knowledge both following a power law distribution. Mr. Beast refers to A and B players as being sufficiently high in learning ability and only differing in their position in the institutional knowledge distribution.

Packaging this effect into a 3 category model definitely makes it easier to operationalize. The severance part is important too, since there would be hesitancy to terminate even obvious "C players".

trhway• 2 years ago

Dependencies and critical components - so much of software development fails because these aren’t understood and managed accordingly.

dcchambers4• 2 years ago

The poor grammar drives me crazy. I get that I am not the target employee, but if I walked in to a job and was handed that on my first day I'd walk right out based on presentation alone.

simonw22• 2 years ago

It is at least self-aware on that front: the first page says “Sorry in advance for all the run on sentences and grammar issues, I’m a youtuber not an author haha.”

dcchambers4• 2 years ago

That shows a total lack of self respect in my opinion. You don't have to be an author to put even the tiniest effort into your writing in a professional letter like that.

latexr6• 2 years ago

He’s also rich and could easily afford a one-time editor. Heck, I’m sure one of the devoted employees would offer to improve it for free.

drcode• 2 years ago

what additional useful information about running a youtube production company would you have learned from the document if it had better grammar?

gonzo413• 2 years ago

And you're exactly who they are looking to move elsewhere. They are looking for people who want to make youtube videos. No faff about over font and comma placement.

scraptor• 2 years ago

The purpose of the company is to produce youtube videos not professionally written internal memos. In fact one might say that this is the core message of the document.

guywithahat5• 2 years ago

One thing I find interesting is that y combinator content (like Michael and Dalton videos) don’t talk much about team intensity and culture aside from cliche terms, but successful teams obsess over it. I mean he’s literally saying he’ll give you $1000 to study the handbook, and the handbook says average employees should be fired immediately (in all caps). I’ve never heard something like that come from y combinatory, but I’ve seen other successful teams do similar things

victor106• 2 years ago

this is interesting.

what are some resources that you can learn on how to create viral titles on existing content?

TheAceOfHearts2• 2 years ago

One of the key details missing from the analysis being done in this thread is that Jimmy was iterating and figuring out how to optimize every part of his content for years before he really blew up in popularity. Having a loop where you keep publishing content and analyzing all aspects of it is the ultimate key to success, given enough time and resources.

As I understand it, MrBeast helped fund the creation of ViewStats [0] in order to gather more data on thumbnails and channel / video performance over time. Then this knowledge is applied to their own content in order to make it even more successful. At this point there's probably multiple people who specialize just in thumbnail optimization.

Another key detail about MrBeast production is that they target a global audience, so they hire famous voice actors of every major language to do their voice-overs. A few years before YouTube supported multiple audio tracks, they had different channels for various languages and regions. Now it's just a drop-down in the video settings. Many products fail to take internationalization and localization seriously, so their products are unable to penetrate non-western markets.

Speaking of international reach, I saw in an interview a few years back that MrBeast was trying to expand to the Chinese market, but none of his public interviews since then have discussed how he's doing there. This goes a bit against the extreme focus on YouTube as his primary platform. A quick search on bilibili (which I believe is the Chinese equivalent of YouTube), shows his latest video hitting 1.6 million views and 8k comments, which isn't bad but it doesn't really compare to the amount of attention that he gets on YouTube. It seems like even the most skilled content creators in the West still struggle to break into the Chinese market.

[0] https://www.viewstats.com/

trogdor• 2 years ago

I didn’t know that YouTube supports multiple audio tracks for the same video. Can alternate tracks be uploaded at a later point in time? Can the feature be used to replace the original audio in a video?

fngjdflmdflg• 2 years ago

It's only available for certain channels. You can see more info here.[0]

[0] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/13338784

latexr6• 2 years ago

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.

ahmedfromtunis• 2 years ago

I'd love to see that document and I'm sure there's a lot to learn from it and a lot of knowledge to use for the good of humanity.

The fact that a shady business used some tactics to advance its cause doesn't automatically condemns the means.

MeetingsBrowser2• 2 years ago

Most shady businesses can be boiled down to, “we exploit people for personal gain”.

Which is always bad.

vincnetas• 2 years ago

You could also like to read some documents from Karl Bischoff (the architect of Auschwitz)

https://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/through-the-lens...

And also Vrba–Wetzler report

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vrba–Wetzler_report

I don't want someone to think that i'm blaming someone for reading stuff. I just think and see that sometimes for people it is very easy to forget or miss bad things (harm to society) when their salary (or income) depends on ignoring this.

ocean_moist5• 2 years ago

Imagine seeing a PDF proving tobacco leaders knew for decades that it caused cancer and saying what you did.

The difference is the game he's playing (youtube) is similar to the game we're playing (startups) so the success is tantamount.

The game tobacco companies play is also very different, so the tobacco companies success will teach you very little about being successful in startups.

barrell7• 2 years ago

Personally the game I’m playing (building an effective edtech company) is probably less similar to the game he is playing (running illegal lotteries targeted at children) than the game Tabacco companies play (lean heavily on branding, marketing, and trying to control the academic narrative).

wrsh079• 2 years ago

Ignoring the ethics of Mr Beast, he is producing real videos at an incredibly high volume and they consistently do numbers.

None of those videos is easy to make.

Sure, it's maybe not great to be so impressed by logistics or supply chain of a tobacco company, but from a business and systems view some of it is interesting

lxgr4• 2 years ago

Ignoring the ethics [...]

I think that's very straightforwardly the point of contention here. Some people are doing that and are discussing the business aspects; others aren't.

I don't think any particular discussion is more appropriate than the other, as long as people are in agreement on which one they're having.

dclowd99014• 2 years ago

I would be genuinely curious to hear: in your mind, could any system be interesting to you, no matter its ethical basis? Or is there a line, and if so, what is the line to you?

sanderjd8• 2 years ago

Ok, but the comment you're replying to wasn't ignoring the ethics. To me, this reads like, "ignoring the point of your comment, [other points]".

Fmrbeast• 2 years ago

His shady way is clearly part of his business otherwise he would be successful without ripping of people.

This is ridiculous analysing his performance while ignoring his ethics especially when it's part of his income if not a fundamental strategy

calmbonsai6• 2 years ago

You lost me at "ignoring the ethics".

By de facto, you never ignore ethics. You may disregard them, but they're never ignored.

atoav2• 2 years ago

"Ignoring the ethics of Mr Beast" — in a discussion on the ethics of Mr Beast.

Sure I get it, probably there are lessons in there ethically good actors could look at and use — but if you find yourself casting away the ethical doubts too easily, you might be in a dangerous spot to begin acting unethical yourself. It is totally possible to learn about the whole system with a morbid fascination while being constantly aware of the ethical implications without casting them aside.

The real question for such an ethics-free look at a business is whether the unethical bits of a business can be really disentangled from the interesting bits in a meaningful way. That is very often not the case.

Ygg28• 2 years ago

Ignoring the ethics of Mexican drug cartels, they are producing some crucial and consistently demanded products. Like high-volume of drugs and violence that rivals the state.

None of those are easy to achieve.

Sure, it's maybe not great to be impressed by the logistics of a militarized drug cartel, but from a business and systems view it's quite interesting. /sarcasm

This is literally cocaine logic, i.e. because I feel good when taking cocaine, it's good for me. Ergo, cocaine is good.

torginus• 2 years ago

Honestly to this day, I don't know what he did wrong, it seems like a concerted effort to take him down and/or grifters want to profit from his downfall by 'exposing' him.

The allegiations seems to have been:

- His shows are scripted to varying degrees - I think this should be obvious to anyone old enough to not think santa's real.

- Some of his friends/production staff did some bad stuff (I won't elaborate). These people are not MrBeast, but sovereign individuals. Production staff in the movie industry rotates at a weekly rate.

- His productions are a shitshow, with tons of stress overtime, last minute heroic saves etc. - If you've read/watched anything Adam Savage has written, you'll realise unfortunately the entire film industry is like this, with everything being on a tight timeline. Practical sets often can be set up once and get destroyed during filming. If somebody messes up, it's often weeks of work and millions of dollars down the drain.

ljm• 2 years ago

I think the ethics are important when you're looking not just at Mr Beast's businesses themselves but also their internal culture, especially when squaring it up against the perception of himself he's created as some sort of squeaky clean philanthropic billionaire, particularly among his primarily young fans. Those big charity videos aren't done altruistically, they serve another purpose of deflecting criticism.

You have the façade presented to the public, then the operations of the businesses he runs, then the culture built within them. If you ignore the ethics then you won't see that a significant part of his success is in his PR muscle, and how (young) people then expect that follows through to working for him or going on his show.

I don't doubt that this isn't unlike the dream of going to work in the games industry as a kid, getting to make the very kind of game you loved to play, only to realise that what's on the inside is actually pretty ugly, and perhaps your fanaticism has been exploited.

oulipo12• 2 years ago

You're conflating "efficiency" with "success"

Just say he's "efficient" at what he does (descriptive) but not "successful" (value judgment)

forrestthewoods5• 2 years ago

What’s shady about producing entertaining videos that people want to watch?

Are Marvel films shady for being popular? Is HN shady for adding features which increase engagement?

vintermann2• 2 years ago

Heck yes, Marvel films, any big Hollywood films, are shady. HN is basically a vanity project so it's less shady. If HN was "optimized for engagement" the way a MrBeast video or Marvel film is, I bet I'm not the only one who would be out of here.

hnbad4• 2 years ago

Marvel films, which (like much of big budget Hollywood at this point sadly) at this point are infamous for their exploitation of cheap unorganized effects artists, are probably a bad example for something being "not shady".

HN actually discourages high engagement by having the front page items change fairly slowly (rather than algorithmically customizing them to each user), not making scrolling beyond that (i.e. pagination and the "latest" feed) any less awkward to navigate than it has been forever and actively preventing you from commenting too much within a given timeframe (which it doesn't actively disclose when you hit the limit). That's probably a bad example for something being "shady".

nine_k6• 2 years ago

Imagine that our bitter enemies invented a superior logistics tool, known as the wheel. Should we even consider adopting it, given its clearly ethically unacceptable origins?

If you think that this is an entirely artificial example, consider the fact that the same man designed the V-2 rockets which were hitting London during WWII, and the Saturn-5 rockets which brought astronauts to Moon: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun

barrell7• 2 years ago

Imagine that our bitter ememies invented a superior logistics tool, known as the wheel. They also invented airplanes and the concept of blitzkrieg. Should we attribute their success to the wheel, and study how it was designed, since they clearly had a mighty army?

I think the idea being debated here is that it’s impossible to know whether the business practices would work without the lack of ethics. It might not be a good case study or a direction you want people going in as it might put them in some of the ethically compromising positions, or even worse require people to put themselves in those positions to work

voltaireodactyl• 2 years ago

Also notable: the first was accomplished under a fascist government intent on violent world domination, and the latter was completed under a (arguably less fascist, depending on exact time frame) different government, specifically because in the meantime there was a large scale critique of the people running the aforementioned initial government by (roughly) the rest of the world.

So I believe your point leads to the conclusion that critiques at this time of the ruling authorities within this company might lead to a reorganization of control, such as might best position any further advancements to benefit a wider population in more pro social ways.

(von Braun being a clear “A-Player”, not a CEO, given the terminology at hand)

huijzer• 2 years ago

Why would a wheel be ethically unacceptable? The example you’re replying to talks about tobacco companies and cancer. A wheel doesn’t cause cancer.

heresie-dabord• 2 years ago

Imagine that our bitter enemies invented a superior logistics tool

Imagine instead that narrow, shallow, obsessed people (NSOBs) built a superior Banality Machine for absorbing the time and attention of suckers. The more suckers who watch, the more revenue earned by NSOB Inc.

Should we even consider adopting it, given its clearly ethically unacceptable origins?

I regret that we have done so. At global scale.

Brian_K_White• 2 years ago

The problem is not the inventor but the invention itself. In your quite inept analogy, the wheel itself is somehow unethical. IE, they didn't invent the wheel they invented the slave.

RobotToaster2• 2 years ago

"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?

That's not my department, " says Wernher von Braun.

xupybd• 2 years ago

This is not comparable

COAGULOPATH• 2 years ago

Being monetarily successful does not mean you’re good or shouldn’t be criticised.

Is anyone saying that Mr Beast is good and shouldn't be criticised? I can't see them.

thisisabore• 2 years ago

No but bro, listen bro, he does numbers.

oulipo12• 2 years ago

Exactly!! we need to stop conflating "efficiency" with "success"

Being efficient at destroying the planet is NOT success

If anything we need to go slower and gentler (environmentally, socially, economically), not "faster"

wrasee• 2 years ago

But also perhaps not conflating “success” with morally positive outcomes.

Being efficient at destroying the planet is to successfully destroy the planet.

I think the original point was precisely to separate the concepts that make something successful - to be successful at what you do - from a judgement on the outcomes - the thing that you are doing.

reichstein• 2 years ago

"Success" is to achieve the intended goal, without causing new problems that outweigh the benefit of reaching that goal.

Reaching the goal is not a moral measurement, it is all about efficiency. If you don't reach the goal, your efficiency is zero. The moral question is what new problems are acceptable. That's where reasonable people can disagree.

bnralt3• 2 years ago

If anything we need to go slower and gentler (environmentally, socially, economically), not "faster"

Do you think we should move slower when it comes to saving the planet? From what I can tell your main issue is with the goal, not with efficiency itself.

gregmac• 2 years ago

Being efficient at destroying the planet is NOT success

For some businesses being efficient means there is a side-effect of destroying the planet. For others it's causing customers/employees long-term health effects like cancer. Many industries that are considered highly profitable have these types of things -- think pharmaceuticals (legal or not), lending, gambling.

"Success" in a business generally means being profitable. Usually this requires being "efficient" but being efficient isn't the goal. Neither is "Net good for society/humanity at large" -- at least not the main one, taking priority over being profitable.

t_mann• 2 years ago

Can you point to the parts of the document, or other resources about Mr. Beast, that warrant a comparison with tobacco companies?

ipsento606• 2 years ago

  > Can you point to the parts of the document, or other resources about Mr. Beast,
  > that warrant a comparison with tobacco companies?

The part where the GP says "Lot of people critiquing this, but you can't deny the success." invites counterexamples of companies that are successful but still deserving of critique.

wesselbindt• 2 years ago

They make money in ways that others would find morally reprehensible. The tobacco industry makes its money off of addictive substances that kill millions per year, and Donaldson makes content for entertainment that literally tortures people in the sense of being a violation of the geneva convention. In both cases they're highly efficient operations that make a lot of money, but whether or not you would call it a success story depends on your definition of success. If your definition of successful is "makes money", then the tobacco industry, Donaldson, fentanyl dealers, etc are indeed successful. If your definition is "the world is a better place for its existence", then not so much.

Regarding sources: if you're genuinely interested and not just being argumentative for argument's sake, you're capable of googling "MrBeast geneva convention" and following the sources from there.

bulbosaur1232• 2 years ago

You could say that about literally any shady business.

Right, and where is the problem with that again?

31337Logic• 2 years ago

Exactly this. Thank you.

We share a planet with nearly 10 billion other people. Money isn't everything.

dang5• 2 years ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41550368.

jesprenj2• 2 years ago

How do they get $1 million+ from a single video? AdSense or sponsors?

shalmanese2• 2 years ago

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 to the content and, to one extent or another, valid, but the social purpose of the critiques is universal which is that I felt uncomfortable that reading this might mean I have to re-evaluate my worldview and I'm going to dive into the comment section and upvote all the people telling me actually, I don't have to do that.

I actually spent over an hour writing 750+ words of my takeaways reading this document and shared it privately with a few founder friends of mine and I briefly considered also posting to share with the community but I took a look at the comments and took a look at what I wrote and decided I didn't have the energy to face the endless onslaught of nitpicks and misunderstandings that are driven, at the end of the day, not by a genuine intellectual desire to reach an understanding, but by the need to prove emotionally that others are not taking this seriously so I don't have to either.

All I can do is be vague and say I think this was an enormously valuable piece of writing that is worth engaging seriously for what it is as it might change your worldview in several important ways.

But also my larger meta-point is that there's a now near ubiquitous "sour grapes" attitude that's pervaded HN that makes it an extremely unpleasant place to hold a conversation and people reading should be aware of this systematic bias when reading comments here.

paulryanrogers5• 2 years ago

Most of it strikes me as toxic, largely only applicable to YT, with a few soiled gems mixed in there.

What are your takeaways?

Thoughts on Tate's Hustlers' University?

Karrot_Kream2• 2 years ago

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 really know why this kind of content is so engaging but I guess it is. Kinda like a sports match where everyone just shouts at how bad the other team is or something.

EDIT: My pet theory is that it has to do with the general aging of the users here. There's a kind of well-to-do, Western, mid-40s (usually male) social opinion I see upvoted a lot here that I feel like hits the sweet spot of the folks who still read this site regularly. But it's just a theory really.

__loam5• 2 years ago

It would help if half the content on this site wasn't highly unethical lol. It feels like the tech industry is having a moment where a lot of us are looking critically at the work we're doing and the effects it has on the society we live in. Sometimes that's not fun but it is important. Sorry if that checks the vibes too much for you.

devjab• 2 years ago

I think it mostly happened when HN became flooded by Reddit users. One of the reason I think this is because of how HN and Reddits way of dealing with new lines is different. In a lot of the comments on HN that I would consider to be fitting on GPs point you’ll see a format a long the lines of this:

This is the first line of my paragraph.

This is the second line of my paragraph.

They are separated because HN and Reddit formatting is different.

mrmetanoia3• 2 years ago

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 acceptable so long as they profit. Because, someone else before him did, so why shouldn't he? It's toxic greed all the way down in this view.

the bizarre social Darwinism nonsense that permeates the internet has done a nice job of taking this antisocial mindset - passersby at a glance recognize it quite rightly as the ideology of the asshole - and rebranded it as 'smart' and a mere recognition of the 'real world' (much to the confusion of people succeeding and enjoying the company of others doing so without robbing one another)

czhu12• 2 years ago

Could not agree more, these days I feel like I only really read more technical posts where "sour grapes" comments are hard to insert. Basically anything about politics, tech, finance, management, news, the top few comments are so predictably negative its exhausting.

throw109207• 2 years ago

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.

I've noticed a similar general trend for some kinds of posts. (the more technical ones tend to escape this) The fix is that when you see posts with that kind of social signaling, downvote and flag them.

The downvote is because these posts are always extremely uninteresting, low-effort, and detrimental to HN as a whole.

The flag is because these posts almost always break the HN guidelines in multiple ways, e.g. "Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.", "Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle.", "Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread."

This is one of the few ways that we can continue to avoid HN from turning into Reddit - by self-moderating. Dang seems to take a light touch to moderation and does almost zero curation, so it's up to the users to help keep HN about intellectual curiosity and avoid degenerating into Reddit.

cruffle_duffle2• 2 years ago

Slashdot got like that way back 20 years ago... every article about technology was a bunch of gumps wondering why we would ever need whatever tech the article was about.

It's pretty out of touch, exhausting and kinda makes me feel embarrassed for whoever posted it.

People think they are so high and mighty and have everything figured out. The fact is, they are just an average human trying to make it through this world like everyone else. Just like me, just like you. Nobody has it figured out.

And to go back onto topic, I thought the leaked PDF was fascinating. There is a lot of good management stuff in that document.

__loam5• 2 years ago

You really are condescending to us over Mr.Beast's management style right now. Hackernews is beyond parody.

mondobe• 2 years ago

One of the biggest (and most imitated) channels... on the biggest video-on-demand platform to ever exist... Yeah, not worth being "condescending" over.

Der_Einzige3• 2 years ago

N-gate died FAR too soon.

aliasxneo• 2 years ago

You're not alone. Lately, I've found myself skimming towards the middle/bottom of comments due to this observation. I suppose the more normalized it becomes, the more people feel encouraged to continue writing with this attitude.

121789• 2 years ago

What changed your worldview? It was a fine read but it mostly boiled down to project management basics, some format optimizations, and some storytelling basics.

I thought it was an interesting behind the scenes look at how seriously they take their “art” but nothing world changing. Which part of the article did that for you?

paulcole8• 2 years ago

What changed your worldview

They’re not saying it changed their worldview. Their point is that if a person is just immediately nitpicking it and dismissing it, then there’s probably something in it that can change their worldview. That person’s project management and storytelling skills probably suck (because most people’s project management and storytelling skills suck).

mattmanser• 2 years ago

It's the weekend on HN, different crowd, often very negative and comments that imho are more akin to reddit quality.

I try and remember to not HN at the weekend, obviously forget sometimes. I tend to find sticking to Ask HN is better at the weekend.

cyanydeez• 2 years ago

One thing that woud help real people deal with internet comments and content is switching from a binary "true" vs "false" dichotomy, eg "this is good", "this is false", etc. That is, everything must be stamped with some version of a binary label.

Instead, a trinary should be used, so among true and false, you can have undefined. Or, more importantly for value judgements, "it doesnt matter".

And of course, like things in javasvript, everything should probably just live as undefined, and there should be plenty of guardrails before choosing the other states.

LeroyRaz• 2 years ago

Please do share your thoughts. It seems a shame to let nitpickers ruin the community for others.

mihaic5• 2 years ago

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 patience to explain in depth where my opinions come from. My greatest frustration is trying to describe for instance why someone like Mr Beast is antisocial (as I actually did a long time ago), and then being met by responses like "he's obviously doing something right to get all those views and he's promoting altruism", responses that obviously never bother to understand what my point was.

If think if we really are supposed to improve the quality of discussions, asking more questions should be common when we fundamentally disagree so much. On fundamental disagreements, either the other party is stupid/naive/uninformed or they have fundamentally different principles that we might not understand, and without which a response is just flaming.

Later edit: I actually think the document by Mr Beast is exceptionally well written, and most startups could apply the main lessons from it. I still think his output is extremely antisocial.

matheusmoreira6• 2 years ago

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 agree with you on this but I don't think it's a failure. I think people just get tired after a while. They get tired, and then they start displaying their disapproval in ways that require less work.

It's just easier than typing out all those words and being ignored.

My greatest frustration is trying to describe for instance why someone like Mr Beast is antisocial and then being met by responses that obviously never bother to understand what my point was

It's really tiresome.

At some point you start to realize that you have fundamentally different values than the people you're trying to discuss things with, that these values are irreconcilable and that further argument will just make people hate you instead of convincing them.

This isn't really about "sour grapes", we have moral objections to what others are doing, and there's no point in trying to have those arguments with people who do those things for a paycheck.

pembrook3• 2 years ago

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 Steve Jobs...a decade or two later, the chips have fallen, and most of us have not become that (yet many have had to watch their former peers become wildly successful). So what we have now is a community of bitter, frustrated, and resentful people hurling those feelings onto whatever the topic of the day is.

Instead of accepting your jealousy and failure to achieve [insert desired outcome], it's much easier to believe that...whomever or whatever becomes successful...is doing so not out of merit, but out of deceit. By placing yourself on a higher moral pedestal, you avoid the pain of direct comparison. Ex: Sure, [insert person or company] is successful, but it's because they prey on [insert moral failing of both the product and the people who desire it]!

wrsh079• 2 years ago

Right, a challenge with an artifact like this is that the writing is good. And it's a lengthy read. The early commenters almost by definition haven't read it and can only comment about their opinions on the creative output of Mr Beast

As someone who has assiduously avoided watching his videos (because of this opinion), I was impressed by the document because it is incredibly practical. The advice about communication, managing critical components and bottlenecks - very very good.

Of course he is singlemindedly focused on building a massive YouTube channel. In the employee handbook it does not say: we treat you well and do the most ethical thing

It says: come here and work hard, we will make a big YouTube channel. (Not: a YouTube channel that is good for society!! Just big!!)

cdchn4• 2 years ago

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.

roenxi• 2 years ago

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.

throw109207• 2 years ago

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.

infecto4• 2 years ago

The phrase "other party is stupid" really stood out to me, and it perfectly illustrates the problem I see. Instead of recognizing that people might have fundamentally different principles, upbringing, culture, or simply not be fully informed on a topic, the first conclusion you jump to is that they are stupid.

mentos• 2 years ago

evertedsphere• 2 years ago

"my summary"

Waterluvian• 2 years ago

I kind of agree. “sour grapes” is usually correct. But it’s also usually the least productive when we’re here just talking, not doing.

DaoVeles6• 2 years ago

Absolutely, some days I could be convinced that people would fight back with me saying "water is wet".

When you see those really great things here it does restore some faith in the place but they are getting further apart all the time. A real shame.

MuffinFlavored• 2 years ago

excuses for why it's not necessary in this instance to re-examine your priors.

Not being funny, how often is this the answer:

I didn't have one prior, I'm being told what to think by "smart people" online and I make my identity alignment with them. I'm empty and can't think of anything on my own, so when I read something, I add it to a memory bank to bring up later in life in conversation with others to come across as "knowing a little bit about everything"

calmbonsai6• 2 years ago

Um well, Mr. Beast IS a fraud (do a casual search), the content is crass, exploitative, and it's perfectly reasonable to critique a person when they have a personalized brand.

This is no different than what's done in ANY entertainment media contract negotiation that takes place with "on-air talent".

guywithahat5• 2 years ago

I realize this is semantics but he’s not a fraud, because he delivers on the things he says. If he didn’t spend 48 hours (or however long) underground that would make him a fraud, but he did. The content might be of dubious quality, but it’s not fraudulent

GlacierFox5• 2 years ago

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.

usefulcat• 2 years ago

Is this meta-meta commentary? I genuinely don’t know but if so I salute you.

windowshopping• 2 years ago

No you're not alone but I didn't realize it until you said it. And I am not dyslexic.

gk1• 2 years ago

+1 I read the whole comment and still have no idea what point they’re making or even what side they’re on.

To the grandparent: if you put in the effort to make yourself more clear, you might get the quality responses you wish for.

antegamisou• 2 years ago

No, this person/LLM model indeed writes way too long sentences.

TeaBrain2• 2 years ago

It's not you. The entire comment is a disorganized mess of poorly thought out and non-cohesive grammar.

In the section quoted below for example, he starts off by writing about critiques, in which he appears to have immediately grasped for words that aren't suited for the purpose, such as how the nonsensical "personalized to" should have been "focused on". He add the completely unnecessary pseudointellectual "to one extent or another", to make it seem like he is intensely judging ideas. He then says the "social purpose" is "universal" which I'm not following the meaning of at all. I doubt many others are either, but it just seems like another pseudointellectual throwaway. He then follows that with "which is that I felt uncomfortable that reading this might mean I have to re-evaluate my worldview", which is perhaps the most atrociously nonsensical and poorly laid out sentence fragment I've read in a long time. In the part following that, he needed a period before "actually" for it to make sense as he likely intended.

Honestly, it seems like he's just trying to write words as they come to him as if in a heated and rash spoken conversation, in which he has a elevated personal impression of erudition, compared to the people he believes he communicating down to.

"The actual critiques are personalized to the content and, to one extent or another, valid, but the social purpose of the critiques is universal which is that I felt uncomfortable that reading this might mean I have to re-evaluate my worldview and I'm going to dive into the comment section and upvote all the people telling me actually, I don't have to do that."

barrkel3• 2 years ago

Read the second paragraph as if it's paraphrasing the people he's pointing at in the first paragraph.

I found it quite clear. But then I agreed with it.

xwolfi• 2 years ago

You are wrong to think public debates are here to reach an understanding between the debaters. Whining that nobody submits to you in a fight is ridiculous: fight, show us your genius, and don't come crying to mommy if we fight back.

Your goal is to convince the audience, not your opponents.

pasquinelli• 2 years ago

nobody's actually paying attention, so your goal is really to fight with people online because that's what it takes to get your blood pumping.

bwy• 2 years ago

I wonder how many of those "sour grapes" commenters have actually read the thing–my guess, not many.

Then on the first page of the "silly little book," where I already have the question: "why should I read this? Why would an employee spend time reading this?" Immediately he addresses that: "if you read this book and pass a quiz I’ll give you $1,000." And if you've seen MrBeast videos, it's not inconceivable that everyone who's read the manual has actually received $1,000.

Corporate leaders would do well to learn from just this. What are you saying in the all-hands meeting that takes 1,000 SWE-hours that's actually worth that much? What value does your employee handbook/documentation provide (in my experience, a lot of documentation provides negative value by virtue of being so out-of-date, confusing, or just wrong).

Jimmy has probably done the math (in a intuitive sense; I don't think he has strong math skills), and it's worth the employee-hours for him to pay them $1,000 to read this PDF to avoid having them waste time or make mistakes they've already made. It's probably worth a lot more than $1,000.

Timber-6539• 2 years ago

Basically treats his own employees like his subscribers. "Stay tuned for the $1000 giveaway!". Have you never watched any of Mr Beast's videos?

The fact that you made it to his company is enough incentive for you to go through the onboarding document.

qwertytyyuu5• 2 years ago

Heck I’m not a subscriber to him and I read the whole document

jdgoesmarching• 2 years ago

If you think this is some genius business advice, find the nearest 20 year old marketing major on stimulants and your mind will be blown.

Props to this guy for producing popular content and piecing together some management concepts, but this is so far from anything corporate leaders “need” to read.

matthewowen2• 2 years ago

I think there's at least some of the cliched HN behavior of "I read the title and used it as a prompt to write about my opinions on one of the nouns it contained".

I don't really care for Mr Beast (but don't think about him much either) and I don't think this is especially revelatory stuff, but I think most of it is pretty sound advice for how to be effective.

Pannoniae• 2 years ago

I'd personally love to hear your views and thoughts. Either about this subject or in general. You seem very thoughtful and self-aware, which is always a positive thing. Don't let the naysayers get to ya....^^

analog31• 2 years ago

I have a hypothesis, that once a thread has more than N comments, a sub-comment under the top comment is more likely to stay close to the top of the page, than the same thought expressed in its own top comment. And certainly more likely to be seen than any new thread.

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.

matheusmoreira6• 2 years ago

I don't know of an antidote to this

Display comments in random order. Then it becomes possible to add a top level comment and have it not disappear forever into the bottom of the page, forever unseen.

Alternatively, comment as quickly as possible. Ideally, be the first person to comment. Just comment your general thoughts and then fill in everything you wanted to say over a series of edits while simultaneously improving the comment's logic, grammar and spelling. This one goes all the way back to stackoverflow. It's a habit I have never been able to shake to this day because of how active I used to be on that site. Probably contributed to my account getting rate limited here.

zulban3• 2 years ago

"and decided I didn't have the energy to face the endless onslaught of nitpicks and misunderstandings"

Meh, just write it well and share, then ignore the feedback. You should really only listen to feedback from smart people that you trust anyway. But I understand your position.

Dig1t• 2 years ago

So true man, the best part of this site are the positive and thoughtful folks. It's pretty easy to be negative and find flaws in things, it's more difficult and constructive to find the positive and try to learn.

lxgr4• 2 years ago

There's positive thoughtfulness, critical thoughtfulness, and knee-jerk reactions of both kind as well.

At least personally I appreciate both kinds of thoughtful comments, and it's what's keeping me coming back here. Equating valid criticism with "negativity" on the other hand honestly seems pretty toxic/cultish to me.

ipv6ipv4• 2 years ago

But also my larger meta-point is that there's a now near ubiquitous "sour grapes" attitude that's pervaded HN

I’ve recently noticed it everywhere. Not just on HN.

danpalmer4• 2 years ago

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 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.

"History is written by the victors" is what comes to mind here. Or in another way, it's survivorship bias. I haven't read the Mr Beast document yet but I can imagine what's in it because my previous company had similar material (although likely far less controversial), and I'd bet many commenters here have similar culture documents, handbooks, mission statements, and so on, which when read out of context or through the lens of a future scandal could appear far more incriminating than otherwise.

We need to get better at distilling what it is in material like this that is a contributor to the success/failure/scandal, and what... just is... doesn't have an impact, or could have been another way. We need to be better at actually learning from these things in a nuanced way.

MrVandemar2• 2 years ago

mostly wasn't fraud, it was truly innovative accounting that with hindsight was the wrong idea

When your "innovative accounting" makes you feel, at some point, that you should be shredding important documents, I think it mostly was actual fraud. You know, criminal behavior.

Let's call it like it is: a bunch of rich, extremely entitled people who decided they should, you know, be more rich by abusing their privilage and positions, and who helped nobody except themselves.

There's nothing admirable there, just another of those lessons that we ignore continually: cockroaches wear suits, and often expensive ones too.

troad3• 2 years ago

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.

YZF2• 2 years ago

Nuance is hard and everyone just wants a quick hit. Especially in these modern days of zero attention span.

I read the blog post and I found it interesting. It's something I will file under "interesting" and over time with many other things informs how I think about the topic of building successful businesses and teams. It's something I've been thinking and doing (more on the teams side, less on the business) for a while. It's not something that you just read a blog about and then go do what that blog post says. This is true of technical topics as well. If life was as easy as just do what this other (successful) guy/company does or thinks (in whatever discipline or on whatever topic) then we'd all be immensely successful at everything. It's true that success and failures should feed into building our intuition of what works and what doesn't but intuition is built over a lot of experiences.

hattmall• 2 years ago

That is a pretty interesting and accurate take. There is absolutely a ton of new innovative accounting going on still today. When / If these companies fail due to market conditions some of these accounting practices will most certainly be labeled as fraud. The takeaway from the Enron tale for the remaining firms wasn't we should stop finding new ways to increase revenue and decrease liabilities it was that we need to hire more teams to write white papers explaining why what we are doing isn't fraud.

rtpg• 2 years ago

Well instead of posting what you wrote you posted this complaint, which just contributes to this vibe. You have the right to vent of course.

If you post something interesting people will read it! Sour grapes comments are kinda boring, and complaints about sour grape comments are also kinda boring.

If you don’t want certain kinds of conversations in a community, one of the best things to do is to “crowd that out” by just offering positive alternatives, with interesting posts.

I have a lot of social complaints about finance, but still love reading about it. Cuz it’s interesting in the abstract!

ants_everywhere3• 2 years ago

What concepts did you feel were new here that aren't beaten to death in standard entrepreneur/hustle porn?

cdchn4• 2 years ago

I tried scouring this document for anything novel or insightful and couldn't find anything. Just a lot of spelling errors and run on paragraphs.

the_gorilla2• 2 years ago

I can tell everyone here has something in mind that they're all talking about, but don't want to say specifically what it is. I definitely agree that if you make any sort of substantial post, you're going to get a million low effort replies nitpicking small details. If you try to respond to all of them, you'll either run out of posts or lose your mind. Most of the time people just pick one small detail, post something completely incorrect or unrelated, and move onto the next headline post to respond to.

snowwrestler• 2 years ago

You’re not engaging with the linked content either, you just picked this thread to pose a general complaint about conversations on HN.

Be the change you want to see! Post your thoughts on the Mr Beast doc as a reply to your first comment and see how it goes.

troad3• 2 years ago

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.

In as far as this is a document that says 'do your best, give 110% 25/8, sacrifice everything for the company', most of what I'm seeing here is the same general approval that latter-day HN gives all impractical advice that a very young person might come up with. ('Just do gooderer, all the time!')

I don't think the change is that people now are now closed-minded, I think it's more that something like Mr Beast's PDF of peppy twenty-something bromides simply wouldn't have made the front page at all in 2014. This would be over on Digg with the other pop-Internet stories.

More broadly, given that the comment section appears around 60-70% positive for Mr Beast, I'm unsure what it is you're actually after. Would you prefer it be 100% positive? Wouldn't that be a huge loss for the intellectual diversity that this site has to offer? Aren't there other, better places for hive takes (e.g. Reddit)?

Respectfully, I think the takes you're taking issue with are precisely the remnants of the old, diverse HN, and the takes you're tacitly encouraging are the monoculture that's taken over the rest of the Internet.

rexpop• 2 years ago

What I find even more tedious is the viewpoint that imagines itself "confronting to a consensus worldview" while echoing mainline meritocratic commercialism.

Shades of "What You Can't Say"[0].

0. https://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

mrmetanoia3• 2 years ago

I agree. We have to raise our personal standards to raise our community standards. The nihilism here is a self fulfilling prophecy and sad to see.

johnfn5• 2 years ago

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 the discussion here.

rsoto22• 2 years ago

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

whall6• 2 years ago

I’m fairly certain most of the “sour grapes” comments are AI generated

ghiculescu• 2 years ago

Please share what you wrote, lots of people might value it despite all the naysayers.

h0l0cube• 2 years ago

confronting to a consensus worldview

There's a bit of missed irony here that you decrying the 'sour grapes' crowd with 'sour grapes' of your own, and yourself have been upvoted to the top. I do agree this culture of indulged victimhood is really dragging internet discourse down, but you surely can see your own complicity in it?

tptacek• 2 years ago

I've never seen a Mr. Beast video prior to reading this. I thought there was some interesting stuff in it (I have a recent professional interest in video stuff, though let me reassure everyone I don't plan to show up in any), some standard-issue "trying to keep a founding team culture going" stuff, and some stuff that read like self-gratification. I didn't write the PDF off. It's worth filing away. I'd be interested in your takeaways.

I did go watch a couple Mr. Beast videos. I can see why people knee-jerk about them here. They are just not my cup of tea, and they're not in a way that really rubs me the wrong way. That's OK! I can be convinced that's just a "me" thing! It doesn't matter; I'm not building too much of "don't like Mr. Beast" into my identity.

I take your point, but also get why people might have viscerally negative opinions about this particular subject? I get the frustration with superficial negativity crowding out discussions though.

weaksauce• 2 years ago

I take your point, but also get why people might have viscerally negative opinions about this particular subject?

I don't think it's just the fact that his videos are expensive click bait where he throws money around... it's the fact that he has some very shady, borderline illegal(maybe actually illegal?) practices. the livestream marketing the chocolate to children to win entries into giveaways that he then scrubs from the internet are probably not legal is one example. there are a few videos on how scummy he is. I think the visceral reaction to him as some kind of genius is warranted.

that said the pdf has some nuggets of wisdom even if it's from a tainted source.

totetsu• 2 years ago

It’s just system justification bias

gmd632• 2 years ago

Hating on "nitpicking" is the funniest thing to me. It's a bold admission that one has abandoned attention to detail. Huge red flag.

enugu• 2 years ago

Yes, correction of a detail is good and not a problem. But using that to mock the central point is a popular strategy in discourse.

In the disagreement hierarchy(https://paulgraham.com/disagree.html) this is level 4 or 5, but pretending to be level 6. Like using a bug to say that the software lacks basic value.

the_gorilla2• 2 years ago

I wonder if this is meant to be ironic because this behavior is exactly what was being criticized. You just picked one specific detail to focus on and ignored everything else.

refurb3• 2 years ago

Really? I see that problem all the time at work.

There is a limited amount of resources (time, people and money). If you have a list of 100 things to fix, you better figure out which of those 100 are going to drive the biggest improvement.

I see teams all the time focused on fixing a problem without stopping for a minute to ask "will fixing this actually make a difference?".

sashank_1509• 2 years ago

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!

Der_Einzige3• 2 years ago

What a stupid meme. "The last men" is most closely seen in that movie Wall-E, with the humans who are on that spaceship.

HNs userbase builds far too much for that. Nietzsche was so garbage, he was just buttmad that Philipp Mainlander and Schopenhauer were 1. much more correct and 2. more famous than he ever was in their own eras.

It's also telling that Nietzsche is the foundation behind all of the garbage from the french post-modern neomarxist/critical theorist/situational international folks. You are the thing you hate.

blackeyeblitzar2• 2 years ago

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.

rsoto22• 2 years ago

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.

langsoul-com• 2 years ago

Let's not indite just HN here. It's more the world is the same and this is just an extension of the internet norms.

Think toxic game forums. They used to be nice and a good place, but now? It's a hot mess and everyone who wants proper discourse already self selected out.

RobLach• 2 years ago

Is this linked pdf an example of something “confronting the worldview consensus”? Or the comments here?

Not a rhetorical question; confused.

golemotron• 2 years ago

Nietzsche called it 'Ressentiment'

klik992• 2 years ago

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 translate ALL the stuff there into other markets.

b) There's a lot of unhealthy stuff mixed in with the parts that seem like they drive his success. If somebody does X, Y and Z and gets insane levels of success, they may not realize that it's X and Y driving the success, and Z is actively harmful. But I guess it depends on what you consider "harmful" - some might think "harmful" means "hurts the bottom line" and some might think "hurts those lowest on the rung". Either one of those might be true. It's like people who think being an asshole like early Steve Jobs is the way to be a successful leader, when he arguably achieved more lasting impact when he mellowed out.

With that context, I think some of the critiques you mention have substance.

"He's making low value content" -> I think this is true, because he's optimized for the market he's in. I think it's a legit critique that this strategies may not be sustainable or applicable to "high value content". He even expressly says this: "Not the highest quality videos.. It’s to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible."

"the culture of the company is horrible" -> I absolutely think this is worth talking about, and I find it hard to see building a long term company on his approach. The myth that you need to push people to breaking points to be successful is poison.

"he's a fraud/it's more luck than skill" -> Well anyone saying that is just wrong. He obviously is very good at what he does.

Personally, I don't think it's a good long term business strategy to depend so much on a single larger company, one who has a history of changing the algorithm without warning or explanation. But it's a good, but painful, short term strategy, and he will come out of it perfectly fine whenever he suddenly becomes irrelevant. But there are others who won't/haven't come out with much, and I think it's good to have a discussion if this is right or not.

But there are good things there, the critical components, the importance of communication. The direct feedback of "You are my bottleneck" is good, but it easily could turn into passive aggression and ways to pass the buck. I'm sure there's plenty of low quality comments here, but don't just write off all criticism as virtue signalling or whatever. There are def lessons in here, but that doesn't mean it's all above questioning.

ta_1138• 2 years ago

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.

krick• 2 years ago

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.

grecy3• 2 years ago

Same

Der_Einzige3• 2 years ago

No one is going to be happy about what I'm about to point out, but reap what you sow HN. This is directly and fully as a result of 1. the current (terrible) set of rules and 2. Dang being a moderator (and this communities unending fawning over his moderation)

Fix both of these, and HN would have far fewer issues related to what you are describing.

All other explanations of this phenomenon which don't talk about the above two are not even close to on point.

dredmorbius3• 2 years ago

Which HN discussion guidelines would you change (add, remove, modify), and what about dang's moderation gives you concern?

screye• 2 years ago

Could you elaborate on the takeaways that challenge existing priors ?

The points in the OP boil down to:

* Focus on your product

* Hire well

* Be extra diligent towards bottlenecks

* State your metrics clearly

* Communicate often and immediately

________

These are standard guidelines for running businesses. HN commenters are unimpressed because there are no novel generalizable takeaways from his document.

For a few years, Adam Sandler was producing low-brow schlock that made 100s of millions in the box office. It was effective. It's not clear if there was a takeaway

________

There is 1 takeaway from Mr. Beast that appears generalizable.

Sometimes, for a short duration, you hit gold. During that time, obsessively extract all value you can. Merch, videos, exploitation, what have you. For a solid minute, you're Midas. So touch as many things as you can. Be shameless beyond recognition.

Too often, businesses see their hockey-stick moment as a sign of long term sustainable growth. That's a lie (in expectation). A moment is all it is. Wring out your business for every dollar you can extract, liquidate as much as you can, and bail before you're past the crest of the wave.

I'm confident that Mr. Beast's Youtube stardom will die in a few years. But, he will leave behind a legacy of obsessive extraction that is unlikely to be matched for quite some time.

bsder• 2 years ago

He's making low value content/the culture of the company is horrible/he's a fraud/it's more luck than skill.

Does this guy know his business? Oh, hell, yes. He clearly knows his business cold. Success always has a significant chunk of luck, but skill is a part of luck, and he clearly demonstrates that skill.

However, just because someone really knows their business and does well at it does not mean we simply give them a complete pass. For example, payday lenders know their business very well yet we still consider them to be exploitative and parasitic.

This guy is super-specializing in explicitly targeting pretty much mostly teenaged males with purely dopamine hit content with very little benefit (if any and possibly a negative effect) to the audience. He is pushing the video equivalent of junk food to an audience with weak, underdeveloped impulse control.

This is going to get pushback, and it absolutely deserves that pushback.

excuses for why it's not necessary in this instance to re-examine your priors.

Which priors should I reexamine? The fact that he is effectively targeting adolescent males? The fact that YouTube is all consumed with feeding the ad machine and should be forced out of Google? The fact that social media has turned out to be a pox upon our society?

aaronbrethorst2• 2 years ago

    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.

killthebuddha• 2 years ago

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

johnfn5• 2 years ago

I think OP is saying:

* He thinks most people dislike Mr. Beast, his company, and think he's popular only due to luck.

* He thinks this document makes good points, but that most people won't be able to see them due to what they believe about Mr. Beast prior to reading it.

nine_k6• 2 years ago

Maybe it's exactly the wide support for irrational but mainstream views is what concerns the author. I mean, that's what you'd expect from a conversation in a random bar, but maybe HN used to be somehow different.

christianqchung• 2 years ago

GP's post is also the top voted post, and most of it is complaining about downvotes and criticism which don't exist yet on his hypothetically valuable summary. If there's anything distressing about HN culture, it's this being an acceptable comment type period.

kloop2• 2 years ago

They're talking about Bayesian priors. Basically prior assumptions about the likelihood of a subject.

It's a common phrase in the ratsphere (and its descendants).

Changing your mind is one outcome, but the implication is that it requires a complete reexamining of your worldview, as changing the internalized probabilities can have many effects on perceived likely outcomes.

amadeuspagel• 2 years ago

What, contrarianism is to conform to HNs cynical attitude, and the mainstream response is to criticize that attitude?

testfrequency• 2 years ago

I credit HN for being the unofficial hangout for nerd snipers

daedrdev2• 2 years ago

People on HN need to think about how wrong others can be about topics they are knowledgable about, then consider that they might be that person in topics they don't know much about

ajkjk2• 2 years ago

Strongly agree.

sanderjd8• 2 years ago

I think I've been reading this same kind of critique of HN for over 10 years now. And I'm hedging here, I originally wrote over 15 years, but realized that my memory of 2009 might not be that good. But either way, a long time!

That doesn't mean the criticism is false. But it's always weird to me when I see it put forward as a new thing.

xkcd1963• 2 years ago

Stop reading crp on the internet and get back to work, "founder"

homefree• 2 years ago

HN comment quality has been degrading for a while, I’m no longer that active here because of it (unfortunately). X is a better source in most cases now (if you choose well and only use the following tab).

barrkel3• 2 years ago

You are absolutely right that a large % of people, when confronted with evidence of the kind of obsessive focus required for unusual success, have mental antibodies activated which reject the message, to preserve their ego and sense of self-worth.

Don't dismiss the entire community because of the loud people and their upvoters though. There are other people here, and they don't necessarily browse HN at a high enough frequency to outvote or outcomment the majority.

(I personally think the document is very good, on-point, and great advice for ambitious young people. I'm no longer that young any more, and I'm also aware of a different side: when you push really hard, you can end up burning out. That's the other side of the intensity the document advocates. You can burn out. It's the single biggest reason I don't push so hard these days.)

glmbk• 2 years ago

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.

infecto4• 2 years ago

I’ve noticed this a lot too. It happens across multiple topics, and if you present a well-thought-out counterpoint or idea, it often gets dismissed. As for his content, I don’t watch it and don’t have an opinion on it, but the document itself was engaging and well-written. It’s unfortunate that the focus has shifted entirely to the content he produces.

emchammer• 2 years ago

If you write everything as if you must put your name to it, and then do put your name to it, your writing becomes stronger, and those kind of contrarian-neuroses go away.

This account name is not my real name, but I have thought about making an HN account with my real name. Mostly I just try to spend less time on HN these days.

im3w1l• 2 years ago

Well I spent an entire week writing a 75000 word essay refuting his document that I shared with some select heads of state. No you can't see it, because of your attitude. Your attitude is really very bad. It's bad. Not good.

greenthrow• 2 years ago

The amount of bootlicking content in here is ridiculous. Nothing in this is special or has much to do with MrBeast's success. In fact, it has a lot more to do with damaging the brand which has happened recently. Thinking you will find success even remotely like MrBeast's by following the contents of this document is hilariously naive.

sweeter• 2 years ago

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 the lights off for days on end and then coerced the contestant to run a literal marathon on a treadmill... and then there's the sexual abuse allegations high up in his team, hiring a convicted child predator and someone else with a long sexual abuse criminal history, among other things. I'm not sure I would talk his business practices up without directly making some kind of distinction or acknowledgement here.

simonw22• 2 years ago

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 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.

elliotec5• 2 years ago

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.

malthaus3• 2 years ago

you empower your employees with a mindset of "no doesn't mean no" and have them get results with pushback on no's. they are young kids mostly, don't you think that they will apply the same learned mindset the next time a girl tells them no?

gonzo413• 2 years ago

Mr best is many things. And one of them is a very good project/programme manager. This guide highlights that.

geerlingguy3• 2 years ago

It's interesting to see the discussion from two different angles—there's a lot of support for the type of A/B/C delineation in parts of this thread, and some people who decry it in other parts.

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.

slt20216• 2 years ago

MrBeast has given up his life for his youtube channel (he writes exactly this in the doc) - and he is looking for other people willing to give up theirs for his channel

sanderjd8• 2 years ago

People should not do that, though. There are better things to dedicate lives to.

AndyMcConachie• 2 years ago

This is what we call a cult.

malthaus3• 2 years ago

the audacity to ask other people to give up their life for helping you fulfil your dream and even sell it to them as them fulfilling their dream.

is it the same "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" shtick the american dream brainwashed americans with?

if you have that much drive and want to invest so heavily in work - do yourself a favour and do it as a leader where you call the shots and have the equity instead of as a follower.

earnesti3• 2 years ago

He is fricking 26 years old. He hasn't given his life for anything. At the moment he is, yes, but likely after some years he is retired on his yacht.

OJFord2• 2 years ago

That's like me saying I've given up my life to have the job that I have currently and live where I do. Or you've given up your life for however you spend it.

It just about makes some sort of sense in the context of something like giving up a professional career in a developed country and moving to a remote African village to do aid work, but giving up your life to make a tonne of money creating viral YouTube videos is an absurd description.

jrochkind13• 2 years ago

Giving up your life for many millions of dollar is a choice.

His employees are probably payed well, but obviously don't make as much as he. So I guess asking them to give up their lives for less compensation is to say their lives are or less value...

pests3• 2 years ago

One thing I find interesting over the last few weeks since this was released (and other MrBeast drama) is how there is now a separation between MrBeast the person and MrBeast the company.

Before today, it was never differentiated. Since the drama started, I've seen more news and people (like yourself) clarify that you mean the company vs the person, and I'm not sure its warranted.

While everything was going good, MrBeast the person took all credit for MrBeast the company. Now, it seems like everyone is on tip-toes to clarify they are trash-talking MrBeast the company, not MrBeast the person.

It just seems a bit weird to me.

geerlingguy3• 2 years ago

Honestly I never met Jimmy even though I was in his studio for two weeks working on the video. I did meet a ton of his employees, many of whom I'd gladly work with again, just not on a MrBeast production.

I just can't speak to Jimmy Donaldson himself. Not even sure how much he's involved in the day to day at the company (outside of being the public face).

saghm• 2 years ago

While everything was going good, MrBeast the person took all credit for MrBeast the company. Now, it seems like everyone is on tip-toes to clarify they are trash-talking MrBeast the company, not MrBeast the person.

Yeah, I can't really understand why someone would craft a persona with a unique bespoke name and then name the company the same thing other than to try to make sure that the company is viewed as synonymous with the persona.

Wolfenstein98k8• 2 years ago

The bigger the company gets, the more separate it becomes from its founder/face/whatever.

Inevitable.

(Although this document clearly sets out that this distinction should be fought at every step, so that counts against what I'm saying. It is trying desperately to ensure the company reflects the man as much as possible)

gonzo413• 2 years ago

The no doesn't mean no section was about contractors and dealing with other people. It was a way of conveying that if you ask for something and get an outright refusal, then it's ok to ask again and pivot on details to try and find a fit. MrBeasts company drove a train into a big pit (one of the few videos I watched). That call, would have started with, I'd like to buy a train and a big pit. It probably started as a flat out refusal before he turned up with money.

valval2• 2 years ago

I bet the folks at Train & Pit Co. Couldn’t believe their ears.

yard20104• 2 years ago

You don't understand. In this culture if you have enough money no does not mean no. You have less laws to care about. In some cases you ARE the law.

citizenpaul6• 2 years ago

My biggest critizism of A/B/C is it is always either a delusion, lie, or manipulation. People that talk frequently about "A players/employees" are almost certainly not the ones hiring them. Why? "A players" don't work someplace where they are not respected and ground to dust as a non-owner. That means at best the best employees are "B-players" and probably most of their staff is actually "C-players"

"A players" know their worth and go somewhere that either has prestige, high pay or work life balance and respect. Like all such places in my experience Mrbeast does not appear to provide those things to all but his inner circle. Which by the way an "Inner circle" is a hallmark of places that like to make noise about A/B/C dynamics.

lukas099• 2 years ago

I would like to believe that's true, but honestly, I know some really hard workers who are gluttons for abuse.

grensley• 2 years ago

"C-Players" tend to keep "A-Players" out of legal trouble, so Jimmy might just now be learning their value.

next_xibalba4• 2 years ago

labor laws and unions

Perhaps this is as much a commentary on the state of labor laws and unions as anything else.

cynicalpeace• 2 years ago

Great article. Its lesson is basically: go 110% in everything you do. Buck conventional laziness even when everyone else is doing it and be the ultimate "try-hard"

Not to detract from it in any way.

veunes2• 2 years ago

I think successful anything it is "go 110% in everything you do".

Havoc• 2 years ago

Questionable as his techniques and friends may be, hard to argue with the results

kumarvvr3• 2 years ago

Imagine the countless millions of hours people, especially young ones, have wasted on this content.

Sure, the argument may go, its entertainment and those would have gotten the same from alternative sources, but in this particular case, viral ready addictive video content is ultimately a bane for society.

This guy has studied 20000 to 30000 of videos, done data analysis on them, and then finetuned his videos to make them popular and earn a lot of money on it. As a business, this is genius, he is talented, he is profitable, his investors are circling around banks. But society has suffered for it.

My kid watches similar pointless videos, and he is on the verge of addiction (any and all free time he has, he jumps to the videos of colorful activity videos on you tube, from chinese or russian channels. He is 10 years old)

I am weaning him off youtube altogether, and involving him in books and other activities, but it is damn hard.

tkgally• 2 years ago

It might be interesting to contrast MrBeast’s management approach with that of Marques Brownlee (MKBHD). He is also a successful YouTuber who leads a team that puts out videos on several channels. While his videos don’t have the huge production scale of MrBeast’s, they seem to be produced on short deadlines and must require close coordination among his team.

If I were young and wanted to work in online media production, I would much rather work for Marques Brownlee than for MrBeast.

rs_rs_rs_rs_rs• 2 years ago

MKBHD is not even in Top 500 of the most subscribed Youtube channels, first give me the details of what those other 500 channels are doing then maybe MKBHD... (and I'm saying this as a long time subscriber)

Etheryte• 2 years ago

Would you say the same about companies, that the only interesting ones worth talking about are the ones in the Fortune 500? If anything, I would say many of them are rather boring examples, we all know roughly how they're managed and run.

tinco2• 2 years ago

MKBHD intentionally has a small team that makes relatively low budget videos. I think MKBHD mainly has a relatively large audience because he was very early to the high quality videos game on YouTube. I wouldn't be surprised if his edge is lost now and his viewership does not grow faster than would be expected of an active channel of his size.

Not to hate on him, but just saying that's in sharp contrast with what MrBeast and LTT are trying to achieve.

jerrygoyal• 2 years ago

despite less views, MKBHD is more net positive for humanity than MrBeast. MrBeast's whole game is to draw people's attention to not-so-useful content.

ThrowawayTestr• 2 years ago

Watching a review on a device you'll never buy is hardly a net positive compared to watching a yacht get blown up.

aae42• 2 years ago

Not so sure, while I like Marques, he has a 100% focus on consumerism.

snapcaster• 2 years ago

Come on, they're both useless consumerist slop (i watch a lot of slop not throwing stones just don't see either as beneficial at all)

dogleash3• 2 years ago

Is product fetishism really better than light entertainment? The MKBHD slop is just branded with that same vibe of the products he likes to cover, namely the self-satisfactions of luxury goods that people mistake for high quality. That gives the false signal it provides more value than Mr. Beast. Yes, MKBHD technically covers products, but so did Top Gear. The content is neither necessary nor sufficient to make an informed purchase decision.

HDThoreaun• 2 years ago

MKBHD feeds the worst aspects of consumer culture.

soniman• 2 years ago

Brownlee is such a mystery to me. The #1 rule of Youtube is show energy, show enthusiasm. Brownlee is like if Urkel were given a sedative and told to review the latest iPhone

replwoacause• 2 years ago

He’s been doing it a long time, has an excellent understanding of the tech industry, and is a master at producing content that is easy for everyone to digest. I’ve been watching him for years and have always thought he had a knack for his craft. Just because he has a calm demeanor shouldn’t take away from what he does, but in my opinion should add to it even more.

igornadj• 2 years ago

The #1 rule is clearly not show energy, show enthusiasm. It's the #1 rule for a subset of content, like MrBeast. The content world is a big place, and the silent majority has no interest in loud and obnoxious.

natdempk• 2 years ago

You mean he talks more like a normal person talking about a product rather than a Youtuber going over the top with everything? The fact that he is genuine is a big part of his appeal.

m3kw92• 2 years ago

I’m telling you, nobody getting rich from this leak.

gleventhal3• 2 years ago

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 rather" conversations I had in middle school.

Maybe he has unlocked the key to virality by vigorously analyzing data, but looking at his videos, at a glance, it seems to more be formulaic, predictable, and simply having an actual budget that sets it apart (if it is actually set apart, as I find it hard to tell how much of it is others copying his work versus hius work being unoriginal).

TheAceOfHearts2• 2 years ago

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.

Andrex• 2 years ago

Agreed, YouTube is the PBS of the internet. It's free and fast.

cnity• 2 years ago

This is why those who can appropriately select good information will flourish in this age. I still suck at it (get pulled into mindnumbing shorts for 30 minutes), but then I learned a new musical instrument for _free_ using YouTube.

aantix2• 2 years ago

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.

elliotec5• 2 years ago

This is not how YouTube, or people, or virality work though.

The fact there is some useful educational content is a byproduct of the machine of lucrative trash of the capitalist hellhole spiral, and the written word will always prevail comparatively. You can always bet on text. https://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/193447.html

Also, as you likely know, YouTube is owned by Google so it’s very silly to say it’s “more important.”

p_j_w2• 2 years ago

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

Agreed.

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

These seem like the outliers.

rurp• 2 years ago

Mr Beast and similar viral videos are hardly the outliers given that their traffic absolutely dwarfs the best educational videos. There is a lot of useful and interesting content on Youtube, but that's very much a niche use. The vast majority of watched hours are on content much closer to Mr Beast than learning how to code or a diy woodworking project.

brigadier1322• 2 years ago

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.

omnicognate• 2 years ago

Are you arguing that the public fascination with it makes it morally acceptable? If so would you consider gladiatorial fights to the death and gruesome public executions, both of which have been massive crowd-pleasers in the past and no doubt would be again if they became socially accepted, justified by the same argument? If not, what do you think is different here that makes condemning Mr. Beast for feeding unwholesome public appetites wrong, but condemning Roman emperors for it right? Just a question of the degree of nastiness?

Personally, I think human behaviour is massively influenced by culture and that we have an individual moral responsibility to take actions that work in favour of having a healthy culture. And I see that individual moral responsibility as resting particularly on those who profit from culturally influential activities (and if Mr. Beast isn't "culturally influential", please can we retire the term "influencer"). I see arguments often made that amount to justifying amoral, or even actively immoral, behaviours by the fact that money can be made from them, with an implicit assumption that humans have no free will when it comes to money, that an action that makes money has to be carried out and that this somehow morally absolves the one who does it. I see that as a corrosive meme and evidence of a deeply unhealthy culture, not as a conclusion that follows from adopting capitalism as the primary organising principle in a society.

kubanczyk• 2 years ago

This type of criticism reads to me as a general hatred of what humanity actually is.

No, that's really shallow. "Humanity" is a perennial struggle. If I'd be looking for a word for the lowest common denominator it would be "beastliness", to stay on topic of the thread.

That criticism reads to me as a general hatred of what beastliness actually is.

bonoboTP2• 2 years ago

Human nature is full of self-conflict and contradiction. There are more base aspects of it and higher ones as well. This has been known up and down the ages. Vices and virtues. "You're against vice, hence you're against humans because vice is what humans like to choose!" Well, no. You can be against catering to the base urges. You wouldn't feed your dog 10 cakes even if it continues eating it. And that's not hatred of dog-ity.

seydor3• 2 years ago

Does youtube have a lot of trash? He s certainly a (very big) outlier but the other trashy content is mostly about expensive cars and shit which is harmless by comparison.

This guy has a genuine love of torturing people

lnsru2• 2 years ago

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.

bmoxb• 2 years ago

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

wholinator2• 2 years ago

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

jimmyjazz14• 2 years ago

"YouTube does not offer math lectures about volume calculation."

oh really did you try searching because I found one in about two seconds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1qXIkr05tk

bit_4l• 2 years ago

I would disagree on the net bad for the world, or at least be skeptical about it. Personally, Youtube was my life changing tool which I used to learn almost everything essential to my career and personal development, and I would assume lots of others would be the same. The type of content it recommends goes with the type of content you interacted with in the past. It just a tool and it matters how you use it

malthaus3• 2 years ago

youtube still has a net positive value. the amount of knowledge & learning (and ok, entertainment) i get out of it on a daily basis is immense and i can't imagine the amount of wisdom i'd have sucked up as a kid if i had access to all this.

if it comes at the price of having it subsidised by the likes of mrbeast, i'm all for it. same trade-off as getting ads on instagram to enjoy it as a free service.

sgu999• 2 years ago

What the algorithm seems to favour is a better indicator of what people use Youtube for overall.

I'm also using youtube almost exclusively as a means of education, but a net positive for us doesn't really mean much. If for one more educated viewer you get ten more radicalised and dumber ones, we may be better off without it.

lijok• 2 years ago

I have the sense that Youtube is net bad for the world

Overwhelming majority of things designed to exploit human imperfections for personal gain are a net bad. Youtube has become one of those things.

Unfortunate, 'cause that's where the money is.

infecto4• 2 years ago

I see it differently. I don't think YouTube fundamentally changes people; it might serve up low-quality content to those seeking it, but they'd likely find it elsewhere if not on YouTube.

On the positive side, YouTube has brought the world closer. We can access videos from nearly every corner of the globe, giving us insight into how others live and interact in their environments. Additionally, it's become an incredible resource for information. If something breaks in my home, I can probably find a video explaining how to fix that exact model. While I'm not old enough to have "adulted" without YouTube, it’s amazing how much you can learn from it.

latentcall• 2 years ago

Yes agreed. Another commenter said YT is the most valuable educational tool in existence today. I think the real answer is a library.

YouTube is 99% junk and just because 1% of it is decent, that doesn’t make up for the 99%.

codedokode2• 2 years ago

Maybe but YT recommendations are good enough so that you don't see those 99% you are not interested in.

meowface4• 2 years ago

There are plenty of terrible books and trash novels. Easily 99% of books are junk (often junk dressed up as non-junk). I think it's very possible that in 2024, YouTube is net more educational than reading. (Speaking in terms of total amount of knowledge acquisition.)

quest88• 2 years ago

So, you always go to the library for every problem you have where you need a detailed guide?

asah• 2 years ago

there's lots of ways to succeed on youtube and in this world. MrBeast is only one form.

As one of many examples, the ww2 channel is quite different but also financially successful: https://www.youtube.com/@WorldWarTwo

mightybyte• 2 years ago

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.

Interesting that you say this regarding YouTube. I've been saying this regarding Twitter for awhile even though I consume quite a bit of YouTube content. However, I've curated my YouTube feed to be almost entirely stuff that is interesting, educational, and that I think I'm getting value from. I've learned tons of useful stuff from YouTube such as how to dress better and tailor my own clothes, how to fix things that break around my house, more effective training methods to accomplish specific fitness goals...I could go on and on. When I go to YouTube in incognito mode, I definitely see the bottom-of-the-barrel content that you're talking about. But it doesn't have to be that way.

matheusmoreira6• 2 years ago

However, I've curated my YouTube feed to be almost entirely stuff that is interesting, educational, and that I think I'm getting value from.

Those creators are still making orders of magnitude less money than people who make zero content attention grabbing controversy meme slop videos.

hackernewds4• 2 years ago

IF it were a net good, they'd let me disable Shorts. But they don't.

matheusmoreira6• 2 years ago

It's not YouTube per se that's bad. YouTube is just a symptom. The underlying pathology is advertising. The attention economy, surveillance capitalism. Those are the real problems. Those are the reasons behind this distortion of the world. They enable people who make moronic meme videos to make orders of magnitude more money than people who actually try to contribute something to society.

gosub1002• 2 years ago

It's infinitely better than television because you can remove ads and choose what you want to see! I know you never compared it to TV but that was the main mode of entertainment before streaming.

I think it's meaningless to criticize MBs content because it's a kids show. Of course it's formulaic and predictable. And I dislike his content too, and blocked him from my feed a year or two ago.

j_timberlake2• 2 years ago

How to Succeed in a Torment Nexus: Make the best TORMENT NEXUS videos possible

joe_g_young• 2 years ago

The A,B and C teams seem to line up with the Sociopath, clueless, and losers in Gervais Principle.. or at least from this url(https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...)

gzer0• 2 years ago

This point caught my attention, as my experience has been quite different, though in completely different industries. How does one go about finding genuinely good consultants, in any industry?

  > "Use Consultants

  Consultants are literally cheat codes. Need to make the world's largest slice of cake? Start off by calling the person who made the previous world's largest slice of cake lol. He's already done countless tests and can save you weeks worth of work. I really want to drill this point home because I'm a massive believer in consultants. Because I've spent almost a decade of my life hyper obsessing over YouTube, I can show a brand new creator how to go from 100 subscribers to 10,000 in a month. On their own it would take them years to do it. Consults are a gift from god, please take advantage of them. In every single freakin task assigned to you, always always always ask yourself first if you can find a consultant to help you. This is so important that I am demanding you repeat this three times in your head "I will always check for consultants when I'm assigned a task""

SonOfLilit• 2 years ago

Disclaimer: I'm a software consultant, so obviously biased.

MrBeast enters a new domain every week so consultants are way more important to him than to a software business.

He has enough budget and fame to, as he says, use the Guinness Word Records book as a phonebook. Or any other resource that records world-famous achievements. So that's one way.

Another is to have friends in the business that can recommend people they worked with.

I'm not sure a third consistent way exists.

Edit: very good technical people can recognize very good people in very different technical fields by their thinking and communication habits. Same for business people I believe. So if you have a wonderful devops employee/consultant and need an ML consultant but have zero idea how to evaluate them, have your devops guy talk to a few candidates and ask him whether they're good technical people.

pocketarc• 2 years ago

I think the key thing here is he's talking about "the person who made the previous world's largest slice of cake".

In other words, if I were working on a new programming language (just as an example), and could go hire Anders Hejlsberg as a consultant, well, that -is- going to be a mega cheat code. The amount of experience he'd bring to bear to even a 30 minute call would be insane. He would save me months or even years in mistakes and bad directions, and lead me straight to the core of whatever I wanted to do.

That's the thing - he's not talking about hiring a generic "cake consultant". With that in mind, it'd be much easier to find those people - you'd know them by their achievements.

potsandpans• 2 years ago

Just an aside, not arguing...

You don't necessarily need to hire someone like Anders to pick their brain.

A lot of people who are not huge in the zeitgeist (and also are not assholes) are surprisingly reachable.

Funnily enough, I've chatted with Anders about programming language design -- I got the impression he thought my ideas were terrible.

For a while, you could just email Noam Chomsky and he would respond.

atomicUpdate• 2 years ago

Both of the examples in the quote give you the answer: talk to someone that’s actually done it.

It’s always amazing to me how often the person 3 desks over has already solved the same problem, but is never asked how by the next person. Instead, too many people act like they’re the first person to ever attempt whatever they’re working on.

solatic• 2 years ago

It's really a question of your expectations.

If you're a software shop, hiring an army of consultants to build out core parts of your solution who will walk away when they're finished, you're doing it wrong. Success doesn't come from assembling piles of slop, it comes from putting together a team that will stick together to build value over the long term.

If you're an individual who wants to improve X part of themselves (fitness, musical ability, scholarship, whatever) then hiring a "consultant" (a trainer, a coach, a tutor, a therapist) is not only massively beneficial but almost an essential part of the process. You can easily measure the value you're getting from the consultant against the progress you're making.

If you're assembling highly complicated custom work on strict deadlines, hiring experts in that specific area of customization is pretty critical to consistently making those deadlines.

How do you find them?

Connections, networking, and reputation, usually. MrBeast is lucky in that YouTube presents a good search platform; trying to find people who had made massive cakes before was probably just 5 minutes of searching and sorting by views.

arder2• 2 years ago

This, like a lot of the advice is "Things that worked for me that likely won't work for you". A lot of people are going to talk to Mr Beast that won't talk to you, Mr Beast is doing a variety of one off projects that he'll never need to revisit. Mr Beast has a shit tonne of money and a shit tonne of resources. For all those reasons, it's something that he can do that you probably can't.

foooorsyth• 2 years ago

Are you dealing with MBB consultants? These are ivy-educated MBAs with no operating experience and no real expertise in almost anything other than powerpoint and credential attainment.

Mr Beast is talking about actual experts in incredibly niche things, like baking giant cakes. Completely different type of person to the extent that "consultant" is just a total misnomer if you're used to the term in the land of F1000 corpo-speak. Mr Beast is probably reaching out to people guerilla-style that don't even have "consulting" firms -- which makes total sense if you're doing crazy stuff on YouTube.

MailleQuiMaille• 2 years ago

He is sick. This is the work of a sick person. He even knows that he is sick but does not care, because of the sickness. I pray for his audience, really.

What's this about the Squid Game video and the half a mil lost because of the "waiting in the sun" ? Did someone die ???

simonw22• 2 years ago

Here’s the squid game story. Thankfully nobody died but it was not a safely run set: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/02/style/mrbeast-beast-games...

h4ny• 2 years ago

For anyone who isn't aware of the problematic issues currently surrounding MrBeast (see sweeeter's comment here for some context https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41549649#41551656), I encourage you to read the linked Rolling Stone document and actually find a working link of the original leaked document and read it (link in post doesn't work).

The blog post happens to miss a few of the points in the original document that would raise a lot of eyebrows and I'm not sure that it's a fair take on "what it takes to run a massive scale viral YouTube operation" if it lands you in all sorts of management trouble and potentially criminal allegations.

jordanmorgan10• 2 years ago

I just couldn’t with this, until the very last page. I feel like so many founders write and expect performance like this, and they miss what he said at the very, very end.

So, I’ll give him credit for that.

foundart• 2 years ago

I know virtually nothing about Mr Beast other than that he's massively successful due to dumb videos that apparently raise lots of ethical questions.

That's not an endeavor I'd be interested in participating in, but I did find the PDF fascinating and read all of it.

A good bit of his guide is about 1. taking responsibility for delivering what you are expected to 2. keeping the big picture in mind

Plenty of folks could benefit from that advice and the examples he provides to make it more concrete.

vagab0nd• 2 years ago

"How to be lucky"

Animats• 2 years ago

Actual PDF, 2 links away from the original article.[1]

Has a lot in common with Roger Corman's "How I made a hundred movies in Hollywood and never lost a dime."

[1] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YaG9xpu-WQKBPUi8yQ4HaDYQLUS...

steve1977• 2 years ago

Will have to read this (the PDF) in a free minute. Almost sounds a bit like the Manual by KLF (which was for dance music production)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Manual

thrdbndndn• 2 years ago

Here’s a darker note from the section “Random things you should know”:
> Do not leave consteatants waiting in the sun (ideally waiting in general) for more than 3 hours. Squid game it cost us $500,000 and boys vs girls it got a lot of people out. Ask James to know more

Can someone explain this to me? I don't quite get what the original quote means.

simonw22• 2 years ago

The conditions when filming their Squid Game episode weren't great for contestants: https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-features/net...

I don't know what "cost us $500,000" refers to though.

philipwhiuk2• 2 years ago

medical expenses and lawyers I imagine.

csomar• 2 years ago

s/consteatants/contestants. My guess is that they left the players in Squid game is the sun and someone got hurt?

gorgoiler• 2 years ago

If I can turn a C player into a B player, can I eventually get them to A player status? Is there an effective strategy to getting someone to open their eyes, participate actively, and ramp up their performance to the highest levels?

I worry that C player status is something fundamentally broken about a person. Maybe it’s as simple as their intellectual capacity?

lofenfew• 2 years ago

If I can turn a C player into a B player, can I eventually get them to A player status?

By definition yes, because a B player by definition can be turned into an A player. But by that token, anyone that can be turned into a B player, is by definition a B player already. Hence, a C player, who is by definition not a B player, cannot be turned into a B player.

I worry that C player status is something fundamentally broken about a person. Maybe it’s as simple as their intellectual capacity?

It would be motivation. Intellectual capacity can in principle be fixed, but motivation cannot because you would need to motivate them to fix it.

CalRobert• 2 years ago

"Since we are on the topic of communication, written communication also does not constitute communication unless they confirm they read it."

Gonna keep that one handy.

popinman322• 2 years ago

Huge +1. If I'd understood this mantra earlier in my career it would have saved me a large amount of hassle.

For juniors: any time you send something important to your manager, confirm they read the document. Don't ask "did you read it?" Don't rely on reactions in chat. Ask a specific question that would require them to read the contents of the document. For example, if you're sending over a quote from a vendor, and you'd already sent another quote before, you could ask "how does this quote compare to the previous one? [link to previous one]" Always get confirmation at least 24-48 hours in advance of the point-of-no-return (e.g. launch, meeting, changing dates, company-wide emails), very preferably in writing.

And for _very_ important meetings, ensure all parties have either acknowledged understanding of the required information, or schedule pre-meeting briefings with individuals. There's nothing quite like getting thrown under the bus because someone showed up and couldn't figure out the subtleties & context on the fly. Unfortunately you can't just say "it's a 12 page document for a reason." when your manager is confused in front of their manager.

jameskraus• 2 years ago

This has one of the best sections I've read on why communication lines are important:

It’s very important as a company we maintain proper communication lines. ... If you skip and just go below you prizemust then call and let the people in charge know. Let’s say you’re a production coordinator and you call a writer and tell him you need some bits about a sandwich being cooked with lava, seems harmless... and then tyler askes her why she is making lava and she has no idea and everyone is confused. This is what happens when you don’t follow proper communication lines.

Skipping over all the typos, it's just such a great visual of the communication breakdowns that can happen when a lot of things are going on.

Also this section on tracking contractors:

[Y]ou can’t just dump and forget your projects... Ask him to send videos everyday to spot problems early, hell maybe talk to him twice a day. I don’t care just don’t leave room for error. No excuses, stop leaving room for error. Check in daily, receive videos, and know weeks in advance if you’re fucked. Not days.

This is more extreme than I encounter in my day to day, very on brand to MrBeast, but it's interesting to see this constant accountability and ownership are so critical in their production. I see similar behavior in some of the more effective people I've worked with.

seydor3• 2 years ago

He already has a huge audience so whatever he puts in that PDF is not really useful to anyone else.

Surprised that he says he studied youtube virality. It seemed that he got his ideas from 80s prank TV but over time his titles became increasingly audacious.

Also surprised that his videos are being watched to the end. The clickbait generates curiosity for watching , but his vids are so predictable it s totally boring

Everybody's riding the "MrBeast" train because he s so successful , even though they truly don't like him. 3 years down the line he will be in court defending his abuses

throw161803393• 2 years ago

I think many readers would benefit from the sections on communication, ownership, and responsibility. I've seen way too many projects fail because of poor communication.

pests3• 2 years ago

It's odd as this was leaked and big on YouTube at least a week ago. I guess not much overlap of this community and YT drama.

pinkmuffinere• 2 years ago

Despite whatever we think of Mr Beast, these instructions have helped build something impressive. The principles are interesting, and could be applied to build other impressive things. I like that. Elements that particularly stand out to me:

1. Taking direct ownership

2. Doing things that are effective, even though they're socially uncomfortable

3. Working towards the goal, to the detriment of other things which sound good but are not the goal

4. The way they fight to keep retention to incremental checkpoints. I don't know if this has any applications for Engineering, but certainly for marketing and communication it does.

5. The claimed method of constantly evaluating his employees _really_ appeals to me

BrenBarn5• 2 years ago

Some people have alluded to this, but I find it sad that so much energy in our modern society goes towards trying to exploit arbitrary particularities of arbitrary platforms. Even if we set aside the stuff like "you're taking a risk building on YouTube because they could ban you", there's the more practical stuff about how the plan is all about the title and thumbnail. Like if YouTube somehow switched to letting you have two thumbnails, or some other UI element that you could customize, suddenly everyone playing this game would have to scramble to figure out how to maximize in that environment.

It just seems to me like following a rich person around hoping some coins will fall out of their pocket. It's a parasitic ecosystem that encourages content to focus more and more on "what works" in the self-perpetuating context of that ecosystem, and less and less on making contact with any kind of external reality.

laserbeam• 2 years ago

suddenly everyone playing this game would have to scramble to figure out how to maximize in that environment

These people are the best positioned to figure this out. They've been experimenting with youtube changes for years and they already know how to experiment out the particularities.

BrenBarn5• 2 years ago

Of course they're best positioned to figure it out. The question is whether it's a good use of anyone's time to figure out such things, or whether we have a good society if it's one where people think that is a good use of their time. I am best positioned to pick my own nose but I don't think that means there needs to be a manual on how to do so.

sigmoid10• 2 years ago

It's clear by now that youtube is just a platform designed to produce the Infinite Jest video. Mr. Beast accordingly just appears to be a step on the way there.

nobrains• 2 years ago

What is the alternative? Don't do the above, and hence not get the views, and hence not be able to sustain what you wanted to build.

BrenBarn5• 2 years ago

But my point is it's not clear they "want to build" anything. There is no intrinsic goal.

bawolff2• 2 years ago

I don't feel this is that different from software eng jobs. We A/B test things to death just to get tiny metrics improvements.

Sometimes i feel like we shit on youtube creators because it seems like what they do is silly or frivolous. But is that last software feature you worked on that nobody is ever going to use but is needed to check a box so marketing can say we meet some standard so that we can sell the product to some big corp decision maker who is never going to actually use the software, really any better?

Jobs a job. Ultimately people are doing it to pay the bills, not for the sake of art.

BrenBarn5• 2 years ago

I don't feel this is that different from software eng jobs. We A/B test things to death just to get tiny metrics improvements.

Yes, that is also sad.

chidog122• 2 years ago

This is literally everything in the creative industry...

FactKnower692• 2 years ago

if you genuinely think that "literally everything in the creative industry" is chasing trends within the well-defined boundaries of existing paradigms that giant corporations have created for you, you aren't a creative

rldjbpin• 2 years ago

interesting to see this leaked a few weeks after the valve one (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41329274), albeit unrelated.

if an actual one, to me it is another interesting perspective inside the minds of a privately-owned, internet-based party that hold a significant mind-share in its domain.

sd9• 2 years ago

The Valve one has been floating around for years

trustno22• 2 years ago

I hate the actual content he produces - the first time I watched it, I kept thinking it's a trailer because of all the cuts and I wondered, where is the actual video, when I realized no, I am watching the actual video - but I have to commend the grind.

He is trully obsessive about getting the most views, almost soullessly designing the perfect viral content, caring about every second. He literally starts with the thumbnail and title and only then works out the rest of the video!

I also like this 2 years old video of visiting his studio. This guy literally sleeps in his giant studio, everything is super optimized.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUzpK0tGFcE

Of course the end result is entirely pointless. But still. I respect the grind.

(I also love when he "builds 1000 houses in Africa" or whatever, and he usually never even mentions the country or the place name. It's not that important. But at least he does some good, I guess.)

phito2• 2 years ago

It's just fast food content.

trustno22• 2 years ago

Yeah and I respect fast food chains in this regard. So, that makes sense.

seydor3• 2 years ago

except it doesnt even feed you

lm28469• 2 years ago

There is a reason it's called "content", "content" for the mere "container" we've become

theshrike79• 2 years ago

Average Americans (his main audience) always visit "Europe" or "Africa", never mentioning a specific country.

systemtest• 2 years ago

In similar fashion, European students with a gap-year will go backpacking in Asia

yeukhon4• 2 years ago

Lol he didn’t build 1000 houses. 100 only. But also, I think many of the houses were rushed to build… so…

earljwagner• 2 years ago

He is trully obsessive about getting the most views, almost soullessly designing the perfect viral content, caring about every second. He literally starts with the thumbnail and title and only then works out the rest of the video!

That sounds like standard goal-oriented planning. Amazon starts with the product's press release. "The Amazon working backward method is a product development approach that starts with the team imagining the product is ready to ship. The product team’s first step is to draft a press release announcing the product’s availability. The audience for this press release is the product’s customer."

https://www.productplan.com/glossary/working-backward-amazon...

Jabbles• 2 years ago

Let's fact check that final comment:

"I Built 100 Houses And Gave Them Away!" 127M views, mentions Jamaica 45 seconds in: https://youtu.be/KkCXLABwHP0?si=3oMfNy0iAGVrTwqo&t=45

"I Built 100 Wells In Africa" 202M views, mentions Kenya 12 seconds in: https://youtu.be/mwKJfNYwvm8?si=qYc8jZWsYXwF1qrm&t=11

"We Powered a Village in Africa" 26M views (different channel), mentions Kenya 12 seconds in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FQvRZg3bcg

veunes2• 2 years ago

MrBeast has a deep understanding of his audience. He often tailors his content based on what resonates with viewers, and he uses feedback to continuously improve. But still there are some problems with approach

mda• 2 years ago

Yikes, I am glad I never watch that channel, probably instinctively sensed its rotten smell from distance.

baggachipz• 2 years ago

Never watched one video either, but it seems to just be "Ow, my balls!"

Just useless brain rot.

snickmy• 2 years ago

Just wanted to add, completely unrelated to the line of business and the moral judgement on what Mr Beast Production does, that I really cherish seeing such a well written onboarding material. The sharpness in articulation, the consistency in the leadership vision, and the cultural undertone is of very high level. For comparison, any tech company I've worked for, doesn't get even closer, drawing in acronyms, micro-cultures and personal interest.

phonon• 2 years ago

He has annual revenues in the hundreds of millions of dollars. "lol"

brrrrrm• 2 years ago

goes to show formal language isn't a necessary component of high communication. might even be antagonistic

qwertox• 2 years ago

Prelude (idk what this means)

10 second lookup for an "important" document...

deskr• 2 years ago

Excellent write up. Intolerable videos.

throwpoaster• 2 years ago

See dogpack404 on YouTube for counterpoints on Mr Beast.

sharpshadow• 2 years ago

The pdf is fine nothing really sensational. Some good advise for video creators and how to commit to succeed at their company. Written in what you need to invest not what you need to sacrifice. The bar is high which is fine tho. For example he wants one to work on 3 different projects on a workday instead of 1 project for 3 workdays.

I watched one video of MrBeast in the past and the pdf explains well why I actually watched it to the end. I do dislike these kind of videos and don’t watch them but success is success and he does things right. One of his rules which is kind of neat is that the clickbait title and thumbnail needs to deliver on the promise - which is a great concept considering over 97% clickbait isn’t.

newaccount742• 2 years ago

I think following through on the crazy thumbnail is the most defining part of the MrBeast brand.

Lots of Yt videos have crazy thumbnails; only MrBeast follows through!

j7ake• 2 years ago

His section on monitoring your information diet is generally applicable to many fields.

If you want to be expert in X, consume content in X (in addition to the deliberate practice and focus on the craft of X).

doix2• 2 years ago

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.

duxup5• 2 years ago

Your comment reminded me of the old content vs process Steve Jobs commentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4dCJJFuMsE

But I agree, it's so tempting to get internally focused, or focused on "improvement" that really shifts the focus to something else entirely (hollywood style movies, tv shows, whatever).

Personally I'm no fan of the youtube-ism and youtube generally, but it's clear that game is it's own game. It's not making a movie, it's not a TV show, it's not even tiktok. It's its own thing and it is pretty clear that generally you have to play that platform's game.

My kids play a lot of roblox, and while there's a lot of copy cat games based on traditional gaming, there's almost a system on roblox as far as what games are popular as far as ease of jumping in goes and so on. And there's a lot of weird creativity you find nowhere else as far as the topics of the games (want to be a bug? you can do that). That's it's own space too.

kspacewalk2• 2 years ago

Lawyers finding problems and trying to stop things from happening instead of finding solutions.

Sounds like they're doing their jobs, which is to protect your future selves from your current selves. Sure, finding solutions is great, but faulting them from finding problems and slowing things down until solutions are found is odd.

Yes, security or IT does sometime have to act as a reality check in an organization that has over-hired over-zealous but under-experienced go-getters who want to "move fast and break things". They are a vital counterweight that makes ambition productive, instead of allowing it to wreck the organization's reputation.

duxup5• 2 years ago

I'm going to interject my own experiences and note that some legal advice seems excessively risk averse and honestly just defaults to "no" and lazy. I suspect that's what the OP might have been referencing.

I know we're generally concerned with the folks playing fast and loose with the rules here, and that's 100% true, but. I find in big orgs sometimes it's far more on the other end of the spectrum.

Ma8ee• 2 years ago

And sometimes security or IT just play it excessively, and never allow anything just to make sure they can't be blamed for anything:

"No, you can't improve the situation with the Linux servers that hasn't been updated since 2013 because those servers don't exist in our roadmap, and therefore there's no policy document that we can lean on to make any decisions. So the servers stay in their miserable state until we can phase over all customers that use those servers to some other product eventually. In a few years. Hopefully."

Note that the above isn't fiction, but exactly what happened a few months ago. Luckily I managed to transfer to a team that didn't have to deal with those servers.

JohnMakin3• 2 years ago

See this all the time - for example, zealous dev "if I had production DB read/write I could get things done so much faster."

Sure, but the production DB has an incredible amount of PII and we are audited out the wazoo, but even if that weren't the case and it was totally fine, all it takes is you being careless with your credentials one time and the company's hosed or we have a massive breach, or some rogue employee encrypts the data with ransomware. So, yes, it would make you faster, and no, you can't have it. It's insane how often I have this type of conversation and insane how often I am the bad guy in it.

bayindirh7• 2 years ago

Replace "youtube videos" with whatever the company is trying to achieve.

Some counterpoints:

- Xerox knowingly didn't fix the problematic gear trains to guarantee periodic part changes, prioritizing money over "best copier possible".

- Ford didn't fix Pinto's fuel tank, prioritizing cost minimization over "best possible car in its class".

- Microsoft is did tons of shady things in its OS development history to prioritize domination over "best OS possible", sometimes actively degrading the good features and parts of its OS.

- Dyson's some batteries are notorious for killing themselves via firmware on slight cell imbalance instead of doing self-balancing. Dyson prioritize "steady income via killing good parts early" instead of "building the best vacuum possible".

- Many more electronic and electromechanical systems are engineered with short lives to prioritize "minimizing costs and maximizing profit" over "building the best X possible".

- Lastly, Boeing's doing all kinds of shady stuff (MCAS, doors, build quality, etc.) since they prioritize "maximize shareholder value" over "building the best planes possible".

- ...and there's Intel, but I think the idea is clear here.

willvarfar3• 2 years ago

Their definition of "best copier possible" was "most-profitable copier possible", meaning they had to balance getting people to not hate it so much they chose competitors, while not being so reliable it didn't need warrantees and services and parts etc?

IanCal• 2 years ago

Those are problematic business goals, right? I think that's very different to aligning team goals to company goals.

richardw• 2 years ago

Those still seem like examples of “whatever the company is trying to achieve”, be it profitability, domination, cost minimisation etc.

folken• 2 years ago

I think this is exactly the point that MrBeast is trying to make.

By being best YOUTUBE videos it means to focus on whatever appeals to the algorithm. It doesn't mean you are better informed, or better entertained, as long as the click-through-rate is great and the minutes people watch the video is maximized.

You could say the same thing is true for Xerox, for them the best doesn't necessary mean that they sell you the best most reliable copier, but the highest grossing product, with a guaranteed post-sale income.

And this is why we can't have nice things.

qwerty4561272• 2 years ago

- Dyson's some batteries are notorious for killing themselves via firmware on slight cell imbalance instead of doing self-balancing. Dyson prioritize "steady income via killing good parts early" instead of "building the best vacuum possible".

Any good alternatives?

II2II• 2 years ago

I suspect the intent was the best for the customer. Like it or not, YouTube is the customer here. The viewers are YouTube's customers.

kogus• 2 years ago

You are not wrong, but I'd suggest that in those cases the company prioritized short and medium term profit over the long term success of the company. Each of the situations you list ended up costing those companies dearly (except maybe Dyson?), and today they serve as cautionary tales. So I think the original point of "keeping the main thing the main thing" stands.

throw0101a2• 2 years ago

Some counterpoints:

The goal would be to be more customer-focused in those cases.

"No one prospers without rendering benefit to others." — Tadao Yoshida, founder of YKK zippers, https://ykkamericas.com/our-philosophy/

With MrBeast, the "best YOUTUBE video" would be one that causes engagement with the viewer throughout the video:

The creative process for every video they produce starts with the title and thumbnail. These set the expectations for the viewer, and everything that follows needs to be defined with those in mind. If a viewer feels their expectations are not being matched, they’ll click away - driving down the crucial Average View Duration that informs how much the video is promoted by YouTube’s all-important mystical algorithms.

You have to both entice the viewer with the thumbnail/title, and meet the expectations of the viewer so they continue watching.

Your counterexamples are a bunch of instances where the company did not meet customer expectations.

mc32• 2 years ago

- Ford didn't fix Pinto's fuel tank, prioritizing cost minimization over "best possible car in its class".

This is a nit-pick, but for the record, The Pinto didn't explode at higher rates than other similar automobiles, also there wasn't an internal Ford Memo, it was an attachment to a letter to the NHTSA --but all people remember is the this so called "memo" Anyhow a myth was born and it seemingly refuses to die. By the numbers:

In 1975-76, the Pinto averaged 310 fatalities a year. But the similar-size Toyota Corolla averaged 313, the VW Beetle 374 and the Datsun 1200/210 came in at 405.

Additional info: https://newmarksdoor.typepad.com/mainblog/2005/07/the_pinto_...

gdilla• 2 years ago

What? Literally that’s the pint. If your goal is to screw over your costumers to maximize profit then the active still applies. Depends on what your goals are.

deaddodo• 2 years ago

That's not a counterpoint, that's a list of examples of exactly what they're saying.

They're not saying make the best product possible, they're saying make the product that sells the most despite quality.

ngneer2• 2 years ago

I do not view these as counterpoints. You are making the same point, which is that the metric one optimizes for is extremely important. MrBeast is solely focused on maximizing revenue on the YouTube platform. The examples you cite also demonstrate the same exact metric (i.e., profit) in other domains. I know HP was in the habit of crippling its printers to extract more money, to add to your other examples.

Out of curiosity, what's wrong with Intel? Are you referring to their selling more capable parts for more money? If so, that does not strike me as a shady practice to maximize profits. More like how the best fruit goes for export, where it can fetch the most return.

cwyers• 2 years ago

A good example here is Betamax. A lot of people lament that Betamax lost despite being better on a lot of measures: picture quality, etc. But what Betamax wasn't better at than VHS was runtime, and an early application of home VCRs was to time-shift NFL games, which ran longer than Betamax could record. It turns out that the end of NFL games is often the most important part, so people bought VHS instead of Betamax. So best is not some idealized thing, but depends a lot on what exactly you're measuring.

But also... this isn't doing well for Boeing? It's costing the money? I don't think Boeing is a template for success.

kmacdough• 2 years ago

Well a lot of these aren't counterpoints but rather examples of when companies naively followed KPIs to their own detriment. Boing has fallen from dominance to a distant second, Windows has been steadily losing dominance, Ford's darker years were around the Pinto fiasco.

While Microsoft as a whole is still quite strong, Ford and Boeing lost significant market position and the losses are partially attributed to these very mistakes.

hartator• 2 years ago

Some counterpoints:

Maybe all of these companies succeeded _despite_ these?

btbuildem2• 2 years ago

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.

I think these are clear signs of a dysfunctional organization. I want to associate that with company size (larger -> more bureaucratic, counter-mission nonsense), but I've also seen large companies that don't get caught in these pitfalls. My best guess to lay blame would be at inadequate, out of touch, need-to-be-fired B.o.D and upper and mid-management deadwood. These are the people that propagate such ineffective culture.

I will forever remember the head of IT at my org exclaiming in a meeting, "I'm not here to solve problems". Blew my mind at the time, but it's emblematic and representative of company culture as a whole.

twojobsoneboss• 2 years ago

TBF there are orgs at companies whose sole role is to play DEFENSE - lawyers, CSO etc… if they deem something too risky it IS their job to block it, and then it’s up to upper management to override them if the situation calls for it.

Now that said they should still try to advance the mission within that framework, and not be lazy.

__turbobrew__3• 2 years ago

I see this all the time. Organizations which are solely dedicated to stop things from happening instead of allowing things to happen.

One example is a disaster readiness organization which mandates that teams cannot deploy code in only a single datacenter. What they should really be doing is making it so code automatically runs in multiple datacenters.

Facilitate instead of forbid.

agluszak• 2 years ago

And the "best YOUTUBE videos possible" are... toxic, useless brainrot? (with occasional for-views philanthropy)

These videos are certainly the best in terms of what money they can make... but are they any good for their consumers?

itishappy3• 2 years ago

Who said anything about consumers? I think viewing "the best YOUTUBE videos possible" in line with "the best CIGARETTES possible" is probably the right framing here.

javier1234543214• 2 years ago

What's wrong with making things for others' entertainment? The moralization of this is bizarre. Don't like it, don't consume it. This man has figured out how to create a ridiculous amount of value, whichever way you slice it.

meowface4• 2 years ago

toxic, useless brainrot

I assumed that's what all his videos were for years and hadn't ever watched any (given I am not a child, among other reasons), but I gave one a chance out of curiosity and found myself surprisingly enjoying some of the competition videos. The competitions are often well-designed and adeptly narratively structured.

underlipton• 2 years ago

His competition and giveaway videos are just the modern version of reality TV and game shows, where the draw is the horse race and human drama. You might call that "toxic, useless brainrot," but personally, I feel like such fare is about on the same level as any number of classic novels (including pretty much anything authored by a Bronte sister). Your enjoyment likely hinges on your level of empathy for the people involved, as they're thrown into complex social situations with their livelihood at stake, or whatever.

lenerdenator2• 2 years ago

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.

"People who realize the ramifications of the proposed route of action beyond 'it makes the number bigger'" finding problems and trying to stop things from happening instead of finding solutions.

There. Fixed it.

sanex2• 2 years ago

Ok but the main issue is the stopping things from happening instead of finding solutions.

aredox• 2 years ago

So your ideal model of a company is the infinite paperclip machine?

xivzgrev• 2 years ago

I liked how honest the guide was. There wasn’t anything fake noble here and a lot of his frustrations I have also felt as a people manager - the questions employees ask, making excuses when deadlines slip, etc

the job is to make YouTube videos that people click and watch

What gets them to watch and stick is a few things but notably wow factor, something crazy they haven’t seen before

The bar for wow factor keeps rising

Therefore you need to keep learning driving better and better results. Otherwise you are out

You need to take ownership for results to avoid delays at all costs.

jollyllama• 2 years ago

While I agree with your general sentiment, that doesn't seem like a particularly insightful quote, but rather a nebulous negative definition. Does the guide mean that "best" is balanced blend of all of those? Based on what sibling comments are saying, the goal is to make the most popular videos, in which case, the guide should say that.

blackoil• 2 years ago

It is pretty honest guide on how to succeed at Mr. Beast productions. They have their own metrics of success which may or may not align with your morals or ideals. It is a collection of all their learnings in making the videos.

dogleash3• 2 years ago

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.

I thought it was well understood that this kind of misalignment is the cost of someone afraid to admit outloud what the goal is.

Mr. Beast, like Hollywood production companies before him, can say "don't forget, your job is lowest common denominator slop."

This is hacker news, so take a tech giant (doesn't matter which) and imagine what it would mean for leadership to tell the rank and file what their actual goals were. For starters it would be internally demoralizing, externally scandalous, and include mens rea for many of their legal "whoopsie daisies" over the years.

tpmoney14• 2 years ago

Mr. Beast, like Hollywood production companies before him, can say "don't forget, your job is lowest common denominator slop."

This feels to me like an intentionally hostile reading of the content. I think all of us have had the experience of working with a co-worker who is either brilliant but extremely prone to going down rabbit holes, or a co-worker who seems to have a completely different idea of what we’re doing than everyone else. “Make the best YouTube videos possible, not the highest quality” is the same sentiment behind “eventually you have to actually ship your software”. It’s the same sentiment behind the derision in the term “architecture astronaut”. It’s the same sentiment behind the “worse is better” axiom. It’s the same sentiment behind “don’t let perfect be the enemy of good”. In other words you need to know what it is that pays your bills and be laser focused on delivering that. A YouTube channel isn’t the place to make art house silent films. A community theater production isn’t the place to practice your improv comedy skills. If your company sells a database, it’s not the place to be writing memory safe shells in rust to replace bash, no matter how annoying maintaining your startup bash scripts are.

PedroBatista• 2 years ago

It's code for: "Your goal is to make this company the most MONEY possible"

Given the current landscape of crass hype beasts with all the peacocking vs the "follow your heart" microaggressions crowd it's easy to see those texts were written, but just like today's "tech company's" that "invent" things that existed for decades already, this is nothing new and it's a sign of a culture with very little oversight based on smoke and mirrors. Ironically this is exactly what the distilled core of "Corporate America" is and we all know what "results at all costs" lead to: See Wall Street, Boeing, etc.

Personally I never cared for the guy, it always looked tremendously fake and dishonest to me, to to each each own. IMO there is nothing new o special about this case, there are little dramas like these all over millions of organizations around the World.

Hacktrick2• 2 years ago

While I agree with you, his goal is probably to make the most money. But I understand why he might not have phrased it that way. For any company their final goal is obviously to make the most money possible. But this goal is kind of unclear. It's better to approximate it like Mr. Beast does through saying that he makes the best YOUTUBE videos.

gwbas1c2• 2 years ago

> Your goal here is to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible.
Replace "youtube videos" with whatever the company is trying to achieve.

I see a lot of unnecessary negative sentiment towards that quote.

The quote has no hidden meaning and should be taken on face value: I could easily see an up-and-coming producer work for Mr. Beast, and get sidetracked with making sure that pixels are "perfect." Or a set designer making sure that a specific prop is placed "perfectly." That's not the point, and Mr. Beast is very upfront about it.

I actually admire that quote.

rwmj• 2 years ago

I was glad to see such a clear, actionable mission statement. At companies I've worked for, the mission statements have been either absurdly broad or completely incomprehensible, and as a result most employees (quite rightly) ignore them.

pjlegato• 2 years ago

teams forget what the goal of the company is and instead get hyperfocused on their teams KPI's

This is the intractable and unavoidable problem with the use of KPIs as a management tool: Goodhart's Law -- any metric used as a target ceases to be a good measure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

You are -- literally -- telling the team, "go make this KPI number go up. Your entire job performance will be evaluated on that basis." It is unsurprising that the team therefore focuses on making that number go up.

If you want teams to consider the goals of the company, or anything at all besides their KPIs, don't use KPIs.

anigbrowl• 2 years ago

Legit, but you're not thinking this all the way through. As an organization grows you'll have people whose primary duty is risk mitigation, without the executive authority to pick up the phone and spend resources on implementing, identifying, or seeking a solution. Indeed, if they spend too much time solutioneering, it will limit their ability to do the job they were hired for. Then they get punished for going too far. The sort of initiative-taking and ownership that works great in a startup can get someone fired in a larger org.

morgango• 2 years ago

Hey! Have you been reading my email? This is a perfect analogy of the medium-to-large business that I work for.

motbus32• 2 years ago

Calling average professionals average is an old trick in the book. If everyone is an excellent professional comparing to outside, they'll be average inside. And then you need to keep pushing extra miles on top of each other and sacrificing your personal life.

This is the kind of mentality that got us all with anxiety crisis and panic attacks depending on medications.

SkyBelow• 2 years ago

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.

Even if you want to take this sort of Machiavellian approach (if that's the right sort of description), it still isn't the employee's real goal. A person's goal is to make consistent money. That is a combination of not getting fired and working towards raises. If someone owns a significant share of company stock (significant in terms of their own wealth, not in relation to the company's total shares), then it will also include increasing stock price, but even that is only short term until they can diversify.

So if you have a KPI that is actually hurting the business to achieve, but hurts your career to not achieve it, then the right approach is to maximize achieving that KPI, assuming you have no input on the KPI. If you do have input, it involves a much more complex question of how does it impact your career to try to correct the KPI.

Admitting this openly is not recommended and is comparable to the company admitting openly what its real goal is (or the executives admitting openly what their goals are, which following the above logic, is not the same as what the company's goals are). This does get into a interesting idea of a company having a true goal that doesn't match the true goals of any single member of the company, which has some interesting implications.

cudgy• 2 years ago

This seems extremely idealistic. How many companies even know what the goal of the company is? Very few employees know this as many companies don’t know it either. Furthermore, there are many times when forgetting about the overarching goal and focusing on the goal that is right in front of you is the right decision. In fact, a strategy that many companies use to avoid this is to split the company up into smaller start up operations that are designed to specifically ignore the overarching goals of the company so that they can on their own perform at the best within their channel.

heraldgeezer2• 2 years ago

IT blocking this or that instead of trying solve problems, etc.

Then you come crying to us when things aren't updated or servers get breached. Also, for DNS/Website blocks it is often management that decides but a baseline of malware/p0rn blocking is good. Besides, account in general are not admin any more in the enterprise. Just how it is :)

Cyberinsurance is a bigger and bigger deal now.

Arch-TK• 2 years ago

I appreciate this is how a startup must run, but must every small tech company be a startup? Where do you find jobs for small companies which are just happy to exist and grow sustainably. Where you can come in at 9:00am, have an uninterrupted hour long lunch break at 12:00pm and stop working at 5:30pm? While also not being paid pennies? I can care about your company and be passionate about my work without having to sacrifice all semblance of any aspect of the rest of my life. If that makes me a "B" or "C" player then that's fine.

Centigonal• 2 years ago

They exist, but they are rare. Large tech companies have the benefit of economies of scale. For what you're looking for, you really need to find a niche player, and those folks don't hire very often. OpenDental, Rogue Amoeba, Impexium, and Cronometer are a few.

dbbk2• 2 years ago

I've seen these be referred to as "calm companies" which is nice.

vitorbaptistaa• 2 years ago

Would anyone be kind enough to download the PDF and upload it somewhere for us, Brazilians without VPNs? :)

bandedetrappes• 2 years ago

There you go ! https://we.tl/t-Vn9dG1qWRU

sunaookami• 2 years ago

Here is the link to the PDF from the tweet: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YaG9xpu-WQKBPUi8yQ4HaDYQLUS...

jonplackett• 2 years ago

Not really sure why it's linked to X anyway. The X post is just a link to google docs.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YaG9xpu-WQKBPUi8yQ4HaDYQLUS...

codedokode2• 2 years ago

Interesting, I only learned about this Youtuber recently, maybe 2 months ago or so despite him having so many views. Youtube seems to be good at not showing you what you don't search for.

What his videos are lacking in my opinion is the quality of scenario and planning. They build an expensive set, give away a large prize but the challenges are either too simple or not very creative. Too little challenges, too little competition, too little motivation, too little expressing of personality like mutual help, sacrificing or betrayal, too little unexpected scenario twists. In this aspect they are not as good as TV shows. As an extreme example, take "give away money to random people" series. What fun is in getting money for nothing? And watching that is probably 100x more boring.

whiterknight2• 2 years ago

Billions of views and total YouTube dominance disagree with you.

anamexis2• 2 years ago

No, they're not exclusive at all. As the guide itself says:

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.

You can get billions of views and total YouTube dominance without making particularly engaging content, and I think that's the interesting point here.

mettamage• 2 years ago

I feel it’s more that the average person likes to watch something simple sometimes, myself included

aswegs82• 2 years ago

Keep in mind that you are not the target audience. Also:

"Our audience is massive and because of that you have to be simple, for 50 million people to understand something it must be simple."

4star3star• 2 years ago

I find his stuff sloppy and uninteresting, too, and he has no charisma. This just goes to show that he really does know what he's doing. He identified the statistically meaningful things to focus on and perfect. Imagine if he was just the producer for someone who actually gave a crap about making quality content.

corry2• 2 years ago

MrBeast - an OG Founder Mode guy?

I'll leave it to you all to debate the ethics of MrBeast's videos, YouTube, and the questionable value of these videos.

Meanwhile, the most fascinating part of this is a glimpse into a new kind of media company, where he instituted a particular process and approach and scaled it up outside of the initial set of producers.

You get the sense he's flying by the seat of his pants into a whole new world, and he's creating the org and the processes on the fly based on what's been successful so far.

The energy, drive and enthusiasm required to create a new model of not only "product" (even one that solely exists to please the algorithm) and company is fascinating.

There are more parallels to startup founders than one might admit.

KeplerBoy• 2 years ago

There are more parallels to startup founders than one might admit.

It is a startup and he is a founder. There are no parallels, he is simply an example. His video production company is very similar to other entertainment companies catering to the same audience like roblox (studios) or mobile gaming startups in general.

corry2• 2 years ago

Fair, I should have said "tech founders" I suppose. I think it's reasonable to draw distinctions between tech, media, clothing, retail, etc startups.

Like, MrBeast seems like a media startup which is different than, say, a SaaS startup or an AI assistant startup. Fair enough?

m1ck• 2 years ago

https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/d964dd8c-047e-4b02-bb....

darby_nine8• 2 years ago

I can't be the only person disturbed by the penetration of terms like "obsession" into nominally professional culture. You should not be asking your employees to qualify for DSM symptoms just to not get fired (with severance, lol, that is genuinely a step up from nothing even if it's clearly meant to soften the psychological shock of reading about A- B- and C- employees).

mdgrech23• 2 years ago

this is why we need unions.

quailfarmer• 2 years ago

in order to disallow obsessive work?

chucksmash2• 2 years ago

"Obsession" predates the DSM and psychiatry as a profession.

darby_nine8• 2 years ago

You'll find that most undesirable human behavior and perception does. This is just "product obsession" marketing bullshit forced onto real-life relationships. If you want to engage in this type of culture because it helps you fit in with founders; fine, that's your own brain you're messing with. Don't force it on others.

p_j_w2• 2 years ago

So does schizophrenia.

xwowsersx• 2 years ago

You may not find it appealing, but the truth is that most major successes are driven by obsession. It’s not a balanced or psychologically sound way to live—no one claims it is. If you believe great achievements come from people working regular hours, taking it slow, and maintaining a comfortable pace, you are mistaken.

Newton, Steve Jobs, Marie Curie...the list goes on. These people's success wasn't a product of balance or moderation

darby_nine8• 2 years ago

You may not find it appealing, but the truth is that most major successes are driven by obsession.

Great, don't force it on your employees. I am not working for you for anything other than a paycheck and flexible working conditions and stimulating work.

Dansvidania• 2 years ago

i would argue the communication registry of influencer/youtuber culture skews superlative.

meaning i would translate obsession -> dedication in common language.

The only information about this obsession in the document is about learning, and there is a specific mention that people are judged based on results and not hours, so I am willing to say that this language is much less alarming than what I heard in my experience in startups.

darby_nine8• 2 years ago

Yea, you're right. I really hate this though.

andyish• 2 years ago

This sounds like it's all been paraphrased from the old Netflix HR document that compared itself to a professional sports team.

mritchie712• 2 years ago

congrats to Simon here. This post is ranking well for a lot of terms people will be searching for.

Pr0ject217• 2 years ago

https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/e524204e4b97c7eb607eea67...

hi-v-rocknroll• 2 years ago

So what really turned me off to this guy was his smarmy ~2019 campaign that also damaged my view of otherwise sensible Youtubers who shilled for him without thinking carefully. As such, pretending to save the planet while failing at math, logic, and physics because getting rich and being a internet->real celebrity are oh so much more important™ than emotionally and financially exploiting your audience or doing what you say you're going to do. sigh

"#TeamTrees vs. REALITY" (2019, Phil Mason) https://youtu.be/gqht2bIQXIY

meindnoch• 2 years ago

Why did you think he was supposed to save the planet? He clearly wrote in the document that the goal is to make the best YOUTUBE videos. Not saving the planet or any other bullshit that he puts in the videos. If the numbers showed that the best YOUTUBE videos could be made by torturing third-world infants to death, then he would torture third-world infants to death. Because that would be how you get the best YOUTUBE videos.

jhwhite• 2 years ago

I want you to look them in the eyes and tell them they are the bottleneck and take it a step further and explain why they are the bottleneck so you both are on the same page.

I've always wanted to be able to tell people they're the bottleneck. I've had talks with management about this. "We need to tell people bluntly so they understand the impact they're having."

Nope, it could hurt a relationship and relationship is more important than delivering.

I don't want to be an ass, but I do love this approach by Mr. Beast.

MetaWhirledPeas4• 2 years ago

I feel the same, but I realized I don't want to be the blunt person; I just want some other blunt person to do my dirty work. This is not really a fair expectation for me to have.

That said I feel like having people who are constructively blunt in your organization can make all the difference. If you listen to stories about successful managers and CEOs it often comes down to bluntness.

It can also go the other way though. Being blunt while lacking in other areas (technical knowledge, judgment, vision, ethics) will just add toxicity.

JohnMakin3• 2 years ago

It seems like the last several months have seen a trickle of information being leaked since the recent scandals involving Chris Tyson and some video series from former employees "exposing" the channel as basically scripted reality TV (I thought that was already well known, it's pretty obvious if you spend more than a few minutes watching it).

What Donaldson has done is effectively hack the Youtube algorithm, and as a hobby content creator for the last 10 years or so, I find it has been absolutely destructive to the "content" world. He's absolutely right - you're not trying to make the best content, or the best video, or whatever - you're trying to make the best YOUTUBE video, implicitly admitting what youtube floats to the top of recommendation algorithms is NOT any of those things. It's hyper optimized to be as addictive and as least satiating mentally as possible, it's entertainment junk food. At least old-school reality TV had semi interesting people on it.

It's just very saddening for me to watch the "beastification" of youtube and the overall creator space. I make content because I like making it. I make the content I would like to watch. It's secondary to me whether anyone else enjoys it, and that kind of creative spirit is absolutely gone on the web, and I completely believe content quality has suffered from it. To some degree the audience is the problem for demanding it, as sibling comments have pointed out, but I think this is blaming the victim a bit. Youtube also pushes these addicting videos out to people and highly incentivizes it. It'd be like handing out cigarettes at the hospital and blaming the subset of people that get addicted. Sure, it's their fault, but the hospital probably shouldn't be doing that in the first place.

yeukhon4• 2 years ago

The abuse and toxic workplace had been exposed a few years back but nobody took those allegations seriously

vermaat• 2 years ago

Nice! Looks similarly written like a LLM prompt to carefully instruct people. It even includes the tipping haha

qzx_pierri• 2 years ago

It seems impossible to reach great success without someone trying to tear you down.

kart23• 2 years ago

and of course, more money then you could ever dream of making at any other company.

I didn't really find anything in the pdf outrageous except this line.

methods21• 2 years ago

Reads like a "How to PM" and "Extreme Ownership" rolled into 1 doc.

The one area that I'm wondering a bit on is the statement that you need to be working on multiple 'videos' aka projects at 1 time and if your not then your a FAILURE... so whose priority list is "prio" when, lets say, you are working on 5-10 projects? And they all have prios/emergencies etc.... Interesting expectation setting here. And concludes with a rather harsh statement too with the "failed as a MrBeast employee that day"...

For reference: Work on multiple videos EVERYDAY Please do not come in and only work on one video during a workday. That’s how you fall behind on future videos and create a nasty cycle that i’m trying to stop. If you drop everything and go all in on a video for 3 days then that’s 3 days your other videos will fall behind and eventually you’ll have to drop other videos to focus on those videos and it will snowball into you can’t do anything but focus on what’s right in front of you because you murdered any lead time you had. If you ever only work on one video during a day, you failed as a MrBeast employee that day

paulryanrogers5• 2 years ago

Seems incompatible with a 40h work week.

eezing• 2 years ago

Never really occurred to me why Mr. Beast content doesn’t appeal to me (nor have I thought about it much)… their sole purpose is CTR. Makes sense. Lame.

ThePowerOfFuet• 2 years ago

Saved you four clicks:

https://drive.usercontent.google.com/download?id=1YaG9xpu-WQ...

anonu• 2 years ago

This is no different than the high performance culture that comes at top-notch firms or startups. The main difference between working for MrBeast and working at a startup is that at least what "high performance" means is codified in this 40-page manual. There's a lot of value in this document regardless of what you think of Youtube, MrBeast videos and the general place these videos have in our cultural zeitgeist.

sylviangth• 2 years ago

How do you guys find employees/founding team members who actually value results over hours worked just like MrBeast?

At this point I’m convinced any great company follows this same principle. I also strongly believe in this in my startup.

But I’ve been finding it super hard to find employees or founding team members with this kind of mindset.

How do you spot these people?

topherPedersen• 2 years ago

While I don't like his content (obviously as a 37 year old man), he's a really interesting person and has certainly built something people want (people being children for the most part).

lz400• 2 years ago

This document makes me want to study it so I understand what Mr Beast thinks it's the best viral video and then de-program myself so I never ever click in those. I'm halfway there, if I see a thumbnail of a guy in a ketchup bathtub I will tell youtube to never recommend that channel again.

motbus32• 2 years ago

Let's work hard to make the rich man rich. It is poisonous to only do your work. You need to sacrifice everything for the well being of the man This mentality should be banned from everyone's lives

jasonwcfan• 2 years ago

A close friend of mine was an associate of Mr Beast, even living in his house in Greenville for several months. He confirmed a lot of the negative press about him in the media, and was himself ultimately screwed over by Jimmy and has been trying to get recompense for years.

MrBeast has always been clear that his goal is to make the best videos in the world. Not to be the most nurturing place to work, or the most philanthropically minded. This document makes that clear. It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that in becoming the best in the world at youtube, he's had to become an extremely toxic individual.

negativeonehalf• 2 years ago

The informal tone of the document is powerful. Makes you feel like Mr Beast is being real with you, that he really does care about this, and that he wants you to be in this thing together with him.

big-chungus4• 2 years ago

Common Mr Beast W

jviotti• 2 years ago

I Googled a bit (I'm not a consumer of these types of YouTube videos) and apparently this guy is pretty rich by now. He identified a path to wealth that clearly works and exploited it well, so he is definitely smart. Well deserved from that point of view.

However, it makes me sad that we as a society even let what he does (a zero-net as many pointed out) be a path to wealth on the first place. The fact that we reward so much something that is so void of value is our fault and IMHO what needs to be corrected somehow. It's sad to think we throw so much money at people covered by ketchup, but many PhD's barely make any money and we cannot figure out how to make open-source sustainable.

If our reward schemes were more aligned with actually providing value to society, this guy might have applied his intelligence and amassed his wealth doing something more worthwhile for everybody.

ViktorRay• 2 years ago

I disagree with you.

Mr Beasts YouTube videos make significant amounts of ad revenue. Some of that money goes to YouTube. But there is nothing wrong with having most of that money go to the creator of the videos.

You can apply this logic to other forms of entertainment too. You can say LeBron James or Michael Jordan just play basketball. But their basketball games generated enormous ad revenue. Shouldn’t a sizable chunk of that go to them and other NBA players that play the game?

Same logic for late night show comedians, all other big entertainment YouTube channels, tv stars, movie stars, movie directors, podcasters like Joe Rogan and so on.

All of these have a thing in common. They release content in some media like traditional tv or newer media like YouTube and they are primarily supported by advertising in their content and through merchandise sales.

I think it’s actually more moral for these people to be making lots of money than otherwise. Because otherwise the money generated by their content just goes to YouTube executives or tv executives or Spotify executives or some other corporate big wigs.

If ANY entertainment makes a ton of money shouldn’t the money go to the ones who create it?

In tv and movies, the Writer’s Guild and the Directors Guild routinely go on strikes for this issue.

Also I think it’s great George Lucas made billions of dollars on Star Wars. Many adults in the 1970’s thought Star Wars was junk for the mind…

brteller• 2 years ago

Great guide for a founder, not a great guide for founders employees. Understand the difference and why it was a mistake. Personally, I apply most of what he’s saying to my daily life but I’ve learned very quickly you’ll have employees that hate you if you expect this from them.

This should be an executive handbook, maybe some trickled to employees knowing if they go above and beyond they’ll get further but there’s a very good reasons founders shouldn’t doodle their personal feelings into a handbook and it’s cost him big.

What we are seeing here is the result of a person that stayed as a startup mentality when it was time to grow into a corporate one. He will survive this I’m sure, but it’s going to cost him a billion dollars and we will start to see a much more grown up version. I hope founders are paying attention to how and why this happened.

How to succeed in MrBeast production (Leaked PDF)

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