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A lot of Mr. beasts content feel like reverse kidnapping and mental torture situations. And the only “mental trick” you need to pull to illustrate just how horr

• zemvpferreira 4y ago
  As a content creator Mr Beast only acts as a conduit for what we, the audience, are willing to pay for. It's not he who is the monster but us.
  • Otek 4y ago
    Exactly. Don't hate the player. Hate the game. And the game is humanity, who wants this type of content. But overall i disagree that anyone is monster here. No one forces these people to be a part of these challenges.
    • igorkraw 4y ago
      Why not both? And why does "criticism" imply "hate"?
    • pfisch 4y ago
      You could get people to fight to the death with enough money as a reward. Is that ok?
      • greatquux 4y ago
        No, but we're not talking about that. We're talking only about if these particular videos cross some kind of imaginary line which is different for everyone and constantly shifts in our minds based on the last comment we read on HN.
  • igorkraw 4y ago
    While true I love how the norm of discussion about this is bouncing between two things as if they are mutually exclusive. Yes Mr. Beast is just following incentives that youtube + attention economy + other factors created for him. But also: he chose to do that. I've personally walked away from good gigs when I was eating rice and beans because they didn't align with my values. He doesn't seem to realise or care. And maybe that's because of his situation, which should the also be addressed. But there still remains some personal responsibility for choosing to make money (lots of money) this way
    • colinmhayes 4y ago
      Mr. Beast is giving away millions of dollars. Imo his channel is unequivocally making the world a better place by providing entertainment and giving people the choice to forego a decade of work for 100 days of humiliation.
  • noja 4y ago
    > only acts as a conduit That's a lazy analysis. His creation is expanding a small audience into a larger one.
  • jrootabega 4y ago
    Our children are the victims. They're willing to watch anything, and unfortunately this is the kind of stuff that they think is normal and good.
  • wil421 4y ago
    That’s like saying it’s OK to create CP or torture someone because there’s an audience. Complete nonsense.
    • mensetmanusman 4y ago
      No, it’s not like that.
  • dustedcodes 4y ago
    But we are not paying for it. He just gets the views and Google (YouTube) are those who think it is ok to pay for this content. People will always consume content about some crazy shit if it is made for free, but would we actually have to pay for it then it would show that most kids who watch MrBeast content today couldn’t actually care less about it. Let’s look at it from another angle to bring my point home. If a person gets assaulted and the assault gets recorded by CCTV cameras and then shown on BBC news then lots of people click the article and view the video, but nobody (or mostly nobody) would pay the BBC to assault another person and film it and then stream it. Do you see the difference?
    • sumedh 4y ago
      > But we are not paying for it. Not sure who "we" you are talking but his fans buy lot of merch from his store which brings in lot of profit.
    • unglaublich 4y ago
      No, Google doesn't think it's okay. A company has no such emotions. The financial benefits just outweigh the financial downsides.
    • em-bee 4y ago
      would we actually have to pay for it then it would show that most kids who watch MrBeast content today couldn’t actually care less about it but the kids are not the ones paying. if we had to start paying for it, the result would be an argument between parents and kids.
  • tpush 4y ago
    Nonsense. Mr. Beast isn't an unthinking tool, but an intelligent human being. Exploiting people for money is unethical no matter how much 'the audience' wants to see it.
    • gambiting 4y ago
      I mean, so is something like Who Wants To Be a Millionare[0] exploitative as well? The whole idea is that people voluntarily sign up, to be "tortured" with difficult questions, for a chance to win some money. Of course the TV producers make money on the show, by broadcasting the whole thing for the audience's amusement. I'm just curious where you think the line lies between this and what Mr Beast is doing? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Wants_to_Be_a_Millionaire%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Wants_to_Be_a_Millionaire%...
      • zigman1 4y ago
        That's an interesting thought. I'll try to brainstorm a bit, since my meeting is a bit boring :) First, what was also mentioned in the linked blog post, Mr Beast's videos lack a certain level of fairness, winners of his competitions are often decided by luck, not merit. Second, maybe there's an added benefit for both competitors and audience when watching Who Wants To Be a Millionare. I'm not sure if that's measurable metric, but it's definitely present. I can learn something new, or test my own knowledge, maybe even decide to sign up.
        • sumedh 4y ago
          > winners of his competitions are often decided by luck, not merit. So just like real life?
      • notafraudster 4y ago
        The air quotes around tortured are doing 100% of the work here. There may indeed be some nervousness associated with taking part in any sort of competition, but I think most people would stipulate that white collar adult professionals answering 15 multiple-choice questions in 30 minutes in a comfortable studio wearing clothes of their choice, preparing in a green room, given access to water and bathrooms is pretty low on the torture scale. Likewise, we don't typically consider, say, taking part in a poker tournament to be torture, or taking part in a 10K race or submitting something to an art contest. There are, in fact, quiz shows that add torture elements. Rob Lowe hosts Mental Samurai, which is a quiz show where participants are put through physical disorientation[0]. This might be a closer parallel to what you are highlighting, but even still there are coherent and easily articulated ways in which this is not torture. There are a great many reality programs that do actually involve a sort of physical depravation which is closer to torture. Big Brother and Survivor both involve not just physical challenges, but also punishments that are centered around depriving people of the sorts of creature comforts they are accustomed to in normal life. Even then you don't have torture, because again the vast majority of the experience involves being treated with comfort and dignity, the punishments that are small in scale and support systems in place to ensure they do not present real threat. So, for instance, you might have someone being awoken in the middle of the night as a part of a challenge, but they will be informed of that in advance, given additional time to sleep later, and the disruption will be minimal. Mr. Beast's stuff has more in common with challenges like the Hands on a Hardbody challenge[1], where poor people go to a car dealership and have to touch a truck for an extended period of time to win the truck.[1] The contestant pool are mostly people who are quite poor, some of whom seem to be mentally ill, the willingness to do it for the prize almost surely implies they have inadequate access to transportation, and it's extremely undignified. But even this has hourly breaks. It seems like a bit of feigned ignorance to respond to someone criticizing the Mr. Beast stuff by suggesting it is difficult or impossible to draw a coherent line in the sand, and then offering such a patently absurd example as something you think would have to be definitionally included. It comes off as playing language games rather than seriously engaging the substance of the criticism. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3gglCEsvGg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3gglCEsvGg [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hands_on_a_Hardbody:_The_Documentary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hands_on_a_Hardbody:_The_Docum...
  • emptyfile 4y ago
    You're both equally disgusting.
• gjulianm 4y ago
  While I'm no fan of him, I think you might be too harsh. > is to imagine he’d given them the money up front and told them that to leave his enter-torture-ment they have to pay up a ransom matching the initial gift. People enter those challenges fully knowing how they're going to go. It's random, rules don't matter, you might get money you don't expect or not get money you expected. The point at which they get the money doesn't really matter, I don't find it a different situation. > That’s what he’s subjecting poor people too, for fun and profit, because he knows the money is worth that much to them Well, he gives amounts of money that are worth very much for a lot of people. I doubt there's a lot of people that can make $500k in 100 days, for example. I watched the one where there's 100 people in a circle, and people got quite a lot of money for the most random things (I think one gets several thousand dollars for being the first to go, for example). I'd get this criticism if the amounts of money were lower, but I don't think it's really the case. A lot of non-poor people would consider those challenges very much worth the money. > And of cause because he’s making a fortune doing this. He says that a lot of his videos lose money and I honestly believe it. Between the money he gives and the amounts he spends to make the videos (like renting entire stadiums) his costs must be incredibly high, even with as many subscribers as he has I imagine some videos might not break even. And he could very easily break even on all of them just by lowering the amounts of money and toning it down a little.
  • dustedcodes 4y ago
    MrBeast is pushing the boundaries on the ethics and morals of how easily people with money can coerce poor people who are in dire need to perform extremely questionable things for the sake of his own amusement. Personally I don’t think this is good in any meaningful way. You could only rationalise such behaviour with the same arguments that other forms of exploitation are explained.
    • gjulianm 4y ago
      I'm not arguing that it's good, only that it's not as exploitative as the parent made it to be. Also, until now, the most questionable thing would be the 100 days in a circle one, and the reward is $500k. I think most people, even if not in dire need, would happily go and do that. Here in the comments you already see examples of that. And, most importantly, I don't see the "coercion" anywhere. Most of the people participating are subscribers to him, he's not just searching for poor people out of the street.
• strken 4y ago
  I'm not that badly off and have never watched a Mr. Beast video prior to this. I would gladly stay within a 300ft circle for 100 days while some dude blasted clown noises at me in return for $500k. There's a library, a garden, some exercise bands, stationery, and 3000cal/day of food. I did 21 days isolation in an apartment at the start of the pandemic, which is 20% of the way there except with less floorspace. There's a really good essay titled The Copenhagen Interpretations of Ethics[0], which makes an argument that the moment you interact with a problem you become responsible for it in the eyes of the world, even if you strictly improved it in a utilitarian sense, and even if the people judging you have done exactly nothing to fix the problem. Reminds me a bit of this. [0] https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics/ https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-eth...
  • isitmadeofglass 4y ago
    Sure, people enter in willingly. And you’d be able to find quite a lot of Poot people who’d do really shitty stuff and let you be extremely shitty to them for money. But so what? He’s still kidnapping and terrorizing poor people and excusing it by paying them off. And Better yet he’s doing so for profit, but he’s effectively have them sign a contract that means they don’t get paid if he gets them to break. It screams of what a shitty person he is in setting this up. If it was just about giving money to poor people there would be no need for the sick games he plays with them, just do a feel good show about how much the money change their lives. But propably not as much add money in it for him doing that. He used to plant trees, now he brutalizes poor people. It’s sick even if it is with consent from the victims.
    • warent 4y ago
      You can dislike his work, but FYI you cannot repurpose the word "kidnapping" like this. First, it's a lie. Second, it diminishes the traumatic experience of real kidnapping survivors. Stop repurposing real words and making a joke of real experiences to satisfy for your own emotional position. Don't bother quoting the definition here and bending around the truth to further your distortion.
    • strken 4y ago
• Aunche 4y ago
  Mr. Beast himself used to subject himself to torture for profit, so it's not surprising that other people are happy to do the same. His first viral video was counting to 100,000. There was another video where he tried to spend 24 hours underwater and stopped because he had built to much CO2.