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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 mak

• lxgr 2y 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.
  • barrell 2y ago
    I don’t know if they’re necessarily two different conversations - there’s a conversation to be had whether the business practices discussed would have been effective in an ethical operation. It’s entirely possible the success has nothing to do with the business principles and 100% the ethics. Same the other way around, or anywhere in between.
• dclowd9901 2y 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?
  • supriyo-biswas 2y ago
    Why I can't separate learning about a topic and finding the knowledge interesting vs. its value judgement against my worldview?
    • teucris 2y ago
      Agree and I’ll take it a step further: shouldn’t we encourage deep understanding of malicious or unethical systems so we can know how they work and possibly thwart them?
      • chefandy 2y ago
        A big folly in political movements is completely disregarding their opponents rhetoric. Studying it and discussing it is not the same as validating it. You can't effectively fight what you don't understand and you can't understand something you refuse to know.
      • dclowd9901 2y ago
        I think you’re misrepresenting my question. Mr Beast’s “youtube success hacking”, or whatever you want to call it, excels in the most obvious of ways: use hyperbole all of the time and use extreme and borderline misanthropic interpersonal interaction to achieve goals. I don’t think either of these activities would surprise anyone at achieving success in _some_ form, despite how manipulative and sociopathic they are. What exactly is to be learned here? Where is the deep understanding? People click on things that are hyperbolic. When people are threatened with losing their jobs unless they perform at an extremely high level, they will work to the best of their ability to achieve that level, at the expense of practically everything else they value in their lives. None of this is new or novel. Most people avoid employing these structures because they’re viciously misanthropic and cynical. Some, of course, do, but I don’t see us using that information to ignore them or prevent them from existing. I just see them lauded for “thinking outside the box” on Hacker News.
        • tpmoney 2y ago
          What’s interesting about this conversation is the different perspectives on the material, not necessarily the material itself. Nothing I read in the document reads like “use hyperbole all the time” or “extreme and borderline misanthropic interpersonal interaction”. Instead most of it reads like the sort of things you’d expect to see in any high paced, high competition industry, just written for the sort of people that grew up in and would work at a YouTube company vs folks that grew up in and would work for a major manufacturer. Every company, whether explicitly said or not distinguishes between employees who are excited to be there and excited to be working on the company goals and the ones who are just there to punch a clock. And at every company the clock punchers have always been held in lower regard than the excited employees. We can worry about how that tendency can lead to worker exploitation (see also the game development industry), but the reality is any time you get a group of people together, the folks who have a vision and a mission are going to be more drawn to and get along better with the people who share a passion for that vision and mission.
  • CydeWeys 2y ago
    Man, this is overwrought. We're just talking about a YouTuber here for Christ's sakes. He makes silly videos of competitions with admittedly grueling conditions for entertainment, but people sign up for it voluntarily and they can leave at any time. This is not a serious ethical quandary.
    • multjoy 2y ago
      A YouTuber who is worth a considerable amount of money.
      • CydeWeys 2y ago
        Not sure how that changes anything I said.
    • dclowd9901 2y ago
      So you feel the person who is doing this competition doesn’t feel like they actually need the money in their lives? Or do you think there might be a power imbalance around financial stability being exploited?
      • CydeWeys 2y ago
        I bet if you asked those people who were winning those life-changing amounts of money, they would say they felt the opposite of exploited. Again, more overwrought language. People are doing this out of their own free will, and benefiting substantially from it. If you truly care about people being exploited in uneven financial situations, you would do well to put all your effort towards enacting a higher minimum wage, removing part-time and contractor classification for all low-paying jobs, etc. Because complaining about fun YouTube videos paying people six figures for not all that much time ain't it. And if you really think that people who don't have lots of money can never consent to doing anything, well god isn't that a paternalistic approach that infantilizes adults.
  • wrsh07 2y ago
    The fact that I find the first chapter of When We Cease to Understand the World (the world war 1 bit) to be breathtaking/haunting maybe tells you everything you need to know (The book is historical fiction)
• sanderjd 2y 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 2y 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
• calmbonsai 2y ago
  You lost me at "ignoring the ethics". By de facto, you never ignore ethics. You may disregard them, but they're never ignored.
  • hnbad 2y ago
    Ignoring the ethics is literally antithetical to good engineering. Alas it seems to be the default for operating a business.
    • chii 2y ago
      because ethics have a cost. If you competitors don't need to obey the same ethics, they will out compete you.
      • growse 2y ago
        If you can't compete without throwing your ethics overboard, the right answer is to put it down and do something else, not join in.
        • chii 2y ago
          > put it down and do something else, not join in. by not joining the rat race, you fall behind. This makes you less capable of withstanding the pressure from other rat racers in the world. Imagine using this logic for survival in the jungle.
          • Joeri 2y ago
            The law of the jungle is perhaps not the best model for human society.
          • freeopinion 2y ago
            Ok. I'll bite. Ethics is one aspect of humans that allowed us to survive the jungle and move beyond it. I take your comment as a joke, but have come to the depressing conclusion that too many impressionable people will not understand it that way. They will think it some nugget of wisdom to revert to being a rat in a jungle.
• atoav 2y 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.
  • wrsh07 2y ago
    I found the top level comment to highlight useful ideas. Operationally, so many people would benefit from understanding bottlenecks, critical components, etc It feels a little silly to say "a more ethical organization doesn't deal with such things" If we're here to discuss the links, then it's a little frustrating to have a hundred responses by people who haven't read the doc or are unable to set aside their preconceptions about someone saying things that feel fairly off topic to the top level comment > but if you find yourself casting away the ethical doubts too easily, you might be in a dangerous spot to begin acting unethical yourself Oh please. If I start a company and link this doc? Sure, then raise some concerns. If I am reading it and finding interesting operational advice about getting things done or inter team communication, I'm not particularly worried about becoming antisocial or accidentally behaving immorally (perhaps amorally is more apt)
    • atoav 2y ago
      I have got the feeling you are creating a disagreement where there is none. As I said: it is okay to look at how evil-corp is doing things, as long as you can disentangle that from their evil bits, keeping in mind the context within which it was written. That isn't stiff over-moralistic behavior, that is common sense. What isn't usually as okay is going all: "Let's ignore the ethics of $X and don't think about the context within it was written". E.g. a simple bureaucratic rule to collect the religious belief of people might be innocent in some free society, but if the same rule was written in a Nazi-occupied country it gets a completely different meaning. Casting aside the context is like robbing a thing of its meaning. Now just because the Nazis abused that rule doesn't mean other societies elsewhere couldn't use the very same rule in a positive way -- they would just be stupid if they ignored the negative abuses of that rule provided they know of them. That was my point.
• Ygg2 2y 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.
  • achenet 2y ago
    what if you study Mexican drug cartels, and you find that they have a certain method of communication that enables them to communicate more efficiently. You copy this communication in your non-profit organization that feeds starving children and find that you are able to feed 50% more children when communicating with this more efficient method. This is not "literally cocaine logic", it's learning from others. To use an example you'll probably agree with more: You can hate the lyrics of a given musical artist but copy their production style and in doing so give your lyrics a better platform from which to be heard. Methods != end goals You can adapt effective methods currently used to accomplish questionable things to accomplish more noble things. although, to be perfectly honest, I doubt you'd learn much from Mexican drug cartels that would apply to software, as the markets are completely different.
    • Ygg2 2y ago
      > Methods != end goals Ok, but the methods (hustle, grind-culture, high pressure on marks) are here just as questionable as the end goals (Be the biggest Youtuber). What can you learn from Mr. Beast? Nothing that a lack of conscience and some basic psychology of engagement couldn't teach you. To reuse your analogy, what if you could communicate information by arranging the corpses of your enemies in a certain pattern, then use international news reports to get the messages across. What could this teach us about communication? Nothing.
      • nothercastle 2y ago
        We learn that they operate on a culture of radical accountability. They are also a pressure cooker organization that micro manages hard and expects employees to pull all nighters
• torginus 2y 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.
  • oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
    I think, potentially more problematic than all of that, are the allegations about illegal lotteries, etc.
  • jjkaczor 2y ago
    >- His shows are scripted to varying degrees - I think this should be obvious to >anyone old enough to not think santa's real. Anyone who watches 99% of media should not find scripting to be a surprise. And many posting here on HN, who have given technical talks and presentations definitely do some level of preparation/script in advance. You can tell which people on YouTube/TikTok/etc actually prepare and have a script - against those who just ramble on with absolutely no plan outside of "this is a cool thing I like, that I want to talk about for far too long". (I watch alot of DIY/maker style videos) Because - even if it is "unscripted" - there are soooo many hours of footage required to cut together even a short news interview segment. Many many years ago, I was interviewed for a short (5m) segment on "wardriving". The camera crew and interviewer took more than 8 hours to get all of their footage/angles and my various sound-bites for 5 minutes of aired footage. (And who knows how long in the edit room) It was eye-opening for me.
  • Ygg2 2y ago
    Plus: - Exploiting his employees to a degree that could be considered torture (Yes, we need to keep you awake in solitary confinement for the time-lapse video) - Hiring Delaware a known Sex Offender, and not keeping him away from children. > I think this should be obvious to anyone old enough to not think santa's real. Some people assumed the story is real, and knowing it is fake lessens the impact of his contests and story arcs in his videos (Mac's trials hit different when you realize it's scripted).
• ljm 2y 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.
  • wrsh07 2y ago
    I actually think this document gives an incredible look at the kind of culture that Jimmy is intentionally cultivating!! There are lots of startups in SV looking for "cracked engineers" and frankly this sounds a bit like that!
• oulipo 2y ago
  You're conflating "efficiency" with "success" Just say he's "efficient" at what he does (descriptive) but not "successful" (value judgment)
  • wrsh07 2y ago
    Sorry, I'm not sure where I used either term If you want, I will though: in the document, Jimmy says he wants to create the biggest YouTube channel. By that metric (his own!) he has succeeded.
    • oulipo 2y ago
      His own... but not yours. Yet you still use that term