7 ms·

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

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

userbinator 2y ago
These influencers' accounts are certainly not inactive.
- hypeatei 2y 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.
  - j_maffe 2y ago
    You're really overestimating the cost of video storage and streaming compared to the kind of revenue they're able to get.
j_maffe 2y 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.
- hypeatei 2y 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.
  - forrestthewoods 2y ago
    YouTube just generated over 8 billion in quarterly revenue. YouTube has been a bonafide business for content creators for ~15 years. Nothing about this says “bubble”. It’s inevitable that every business changes with time. And on a long enough horizon collapse is inevitable. But that doesn’t make it a bubble.
- postalrat 2y ago
  When people realize they can spent a fraction of what they pay for advertising and get the same results.
  - j_maffe 2y ago
    Do you have any proof of that?
ignoramous 2y 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.
agos 2y ago
people who work in marketing/growth are already saying that influencer marketer rates have steeply declined. we can only hope!
- worldsayshi 2y 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.
worldsayshi 2y 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 2y ago
  This is a good point. See alcohol and tobacco. People are smoking less though, aren't they?
  - cbanek 2y ago
    I think people are starting to drink less too. Now doctors are starting to ask patients how often they drink and advising them to drink less and less frequently.
    - aswegs8 2y ago
      Imagine doctors routinely asking their patients if they spend too much time on their phones. Would feel a bit intrusive but for some vulnerable populations like kids it might be a good thing to ask about.
      - splatzone 2y ago
        This is absolutely the responsibility of the healthcare system tbh. It feels intrusive right now, but discouraging smoking would have felt intrusive once too.
  - worldsayshi 2y ago
    Yes, press the play button on the world map here: https://ourworldindata.org/which-countries-smoke-most https://ourworldindata.org/which-countries-smoke-most
- 2y ago
hnpolicestate 2y 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.
- KPGv2 2y 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.
  - morkalork 2y ago
    Sadly it doesn't get nearly the amount of attention it deserves. Just picking adult animation as another example, for every series like Scavengers Reign (cancelled after 1 season), there's what, two dozen low brow family guy knockoffs?
    - hnpolicestate 2y ago
      Scavengers Reign was excellent.
    - hnpolicestate 2y ago
      Btw. It's also seeped into video games. Compare Star Wars Outlaws to Star Wars Galaxies or KOTOR. Scary.
      - orwin 2y ago
        KOTOR, both of them but especially the 2nd are built on concepts (post-nihilist existentialism amongst other, to me it's the most obvious) that drive the story. I feel like nowadays, AAA games want to avoid philosophical stuff, or rather keep it way too simple, and we have shit stories (fallout 4/Skyrim. An exception though for Fallout 4 Far harbor DLC). But we still have good non story-driven AAA games.
mrkramer 2y 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 2y 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..
joshdavham 2y 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?
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
zulban 2y 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.
- abeyer 2y 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.
  - np_tedious 2y ago
    If you really think that, then you should be all the more interested in what it means to execute on that allegedly-harmful effort well vs poorly
    - abeyer 2y ago
      While there's merit to the "know your enemy" approach, I wouldn't expect everyone to take it.
  - oulipo 2y ago
    exactly
  - zulban 2y ago
    You seem to be arguing there's no use in learning about immoral businesses.
    - 2y ago
serjester 2y 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 2y 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.
  - CaptainFever 2y ago
    > but I think “It makes money so it must be valuable” is a terrible benchmark. The GP never said this. They didn't say it was good because it made money, they said it was good because people like it and watch it. I like it and watch it. I agree with the GP.
doe_eyes 2y 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 2y 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.
- refulgentis 2y 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...
  - nicomeemes 2y ago
    Well, at the very least Black Mirror will have plenty of ideas for next season.
    - wussboy 2y ago
      I’m not sure it’s still “Black”. I think it might just be “Mirror”.
  - sixothree 2y ago
    Wow. Your feed is pretty messed up. Here is my youtube shorts feed: - how programmers actually review code - 3D Printed Latch Mechanism - I Always Thought This Border Was Straight (about a border in australia) - You need to go to a “better” place! (rescue of an injured raptor) I think YouTube is a lot like twitter (5 years ago), in that what you view and follow affects what you're fed.
oulipo 2y 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
- simonw 2y 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 https://basecamp.com/handbook
  - collinmanderson 2y ago
    Yes, MrBeast's doc definitely also had "Getting Real" vibes. https://basecamp.com/gettingreal https://basecamp.com/gettingreal
  - oulipo 2y ago
    You seem to see him as a "success", which means you have a weird definition of "success" (eg you see efficiency as success) I see a lone tree planter saving the Sahara from desertification and not making a lot of money or being very "efficient on Youtube" as MUCH more successful than MrBeast for my values... So indeed it seems that you were unconsciously attracted by "efficiency" as "success", which is a common trait of people in tech And this should be REALLY questioned, because our planet is going to the shitters (environment, climate) BECAUSE of extreme efficiency (to suck resources out and waste it) That's why we expect from people that they take such entreprise as that of MrBeast with a grain of salt and more judgment Basically his document is: "how to be even more efficient at inducing addiction-like behaviors in teens so that Youtube can sell them more ads for products they don't need (wasting the planet) and that I can get a slight share of this which is going to make me multi-millionaire (although I don't really need the money)" is that REALLY the behavior which merits to be called "success"? Is that the kind of behavior we want our kids (or ourselves) to emulate?
brap 2y ago
Google wipes inactive accounts because they’re often used for spam and malware.
TMWNN 2y 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.
tobyhinloopen 2y ago
Social media / influencer sphere a bubble that’s going to pop? I… highly doubt that.

userbinator 2y ago

These influencers' accounts are certainly not inactive.

hypeatei 2y 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.
- j_maffe 2y ago
  You're really overestimating the cost of video storage and streaming compared to the kind of revenue they're able to get.

j_maffe 2y 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.

hypeatei 2y 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.
- forrestthewoods 2y ago
  YouTube just generated over 8 billion in quarterly revenue. YouTube has been a bonafide business for content creators for ~15 years. Nothing about this says “bubble”. It’s inevitable that every business changes with time. And on a long enough horizon collapse is inevitable. But that doesn’t make it a bubble.
postalrat 2y ago
When people realize they can spent a fraction of what they pay for advertising and get the same results.
- j_maffe 2y ago
  Do you have any proof of that?

ignoramous 2y 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.

agos 2y ago

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

worldsayshi 2y 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.

worldsayshi 2y 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 2y ago
This is a good point. See alcohol and tobacco. People are smoking less though, aren't they?
- cbanek 2y ago
  I think people are starting to drink less too. Now doctors are starting to ask patients how often they drink and advising them to drink less and less frequently.
  - aswegs8 2y ago
    Imagine doctors routinely asking their patients if they spend too much time on their phones. Would feel a bit intrusive but for some vulnerable populations like kids it might be a good thing to ask about.
    - splatzone 2y ago
      This is absolutely the responsibility of the healthcare system tbh. It feels intrusive right now, but discouraging smoking would have felt intrusive once too.
- worldsayshi 2y ago
  Yes, press the play button on the world map here: https://ourworldindata.org/which-countries-smoke-most https://ourworldindata.org/which-countries-smoke-most
2y ago

hnpolicestate 2y 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.

KPGv2 2y 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.
- morkalork 2y ago
  Sadly it doesn't get nearly the amount of attention it deserves. Just picking adult animation as another example, for every series like Scavengers Reign (cancelled after 1 season), there's what, two dozen low brow family guy knockoffs?
  - hnpolicestate 2y ago
    Scavengers Reign was excellent.
  - hnpolicestate 2y ago
    Btw. It's also seeped into video games. Compare Star Wars Outlaws to Star Wars Galaxies or KOTOR. Scary.
    - orwin 2y ago
      KOTOR, both of them but especially the 2nd are built on concepts (post-nihilist existentialism amongst other, to me it's the most obvious) that drive the story. I feel like nowadays, AAA games want to avoid philosophical stuff, or rather keep it way too simple, and we have shit stories (fallout 4/Skyrim. An exception though for Fallout 4 Far harbor DLC). But we still have good non story-driven AAA games.

mrkramer 2y 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 2y 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..

joshdavham 2y 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?

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

zulban 2y 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.

abeyer 2y 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.
- np_tedious 2y ago
  If you really think that, then you should be all the more interested in what it means to execute on that allegedly-harmful effort well vs poorly
  - abeyer 2y ago
    While there's merit to the "know your enemy" approach, I wouldn't expect everyone to take it.
- oulipo 2y ago
  exactly
- zulban 2y ago
  You seem to be arguing there's no use in learning about immoral businesses.
  - 2y ago

serjester 2y 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 2y 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.
- CaptainFever 2y ago
  > but I think “It makes money so it must be valuable” is a terrible benchmark. The GP never said this. They didn't say it was good because it made money, they said it was good because people like it and watch it. I like it and watch it. I agree with the GP.

doe_eyes 2y 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 2y 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.

refulgentis 2y 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...
- nicomeemes 2y ago
  Well, at the very least Black Mirror will have plenty of ideas for next season.
  - wussboy 2y ago
    I’m not sure it’s still “Black”. I think it might just be “Mirror”.
- sixothree 2y ago
  Wow. Your feed is pretty messed up. Here is my youtube shorts feed: - how programmers actually review code - 3D Printed Latch Mechanism - I Always Thought This Border Was Straight (about a border in australia) - You need to go to a “better” place! (rescue of an injured raptor) I think YouTube is a lot like twitter (5 years ago), in that what you view and follow affects what you're fed.

oulipo 2y 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

simonw 2y 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 https://basecamp.com/handbook
- collinmanderson 2y ago
  Yes, MrBeast's doc definitely also had "Getting Real" vibes. https://basecamp.com/gettingreal https://basecamp.com/gettingreal
- oulipo 2y ago
  You seem to see him as a "success", which means you have a weird definition of "success" (eg you see efficiency as success) I see a lone tree planter saving the Sahara from desertification and not making a lot of money or being very "efficient on Youtube" as MUCH more successful than MrBeast for my values... So indeed it seems that you were unconsciously attracted by "efficiency" as "success", which is a common trait of people in tech And this should be REALLY questioned, because our planet is going to the shitters (environment, climate) BECAUSE of extreme efficiency (to suck resources out and waste it) That's why we expect from people that they take such entreprise as that of MrBeast with a grain of salt and more judgment Basically his document is: "how to be even more efficient at inducing addiction-like behaviors in teens so that Youtube can sell them more ads for products they don't need (wasting the planet) and that I can get a slight share of this which is going to make me multi-millionaire (although I don't really need the money)" is that REALLY the behavior which merits to be called "success"? Is that the kind of behavior we want our kids (or ourselves) to emulate?

brap 2y ago

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

TMWNN 2y 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.

tobyhinloopen 2y ago

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