Does anyone remember when this person who worked for Mr Beast outed their fraudulent tactics? You couldn’t bring it up in a comment on their videos at all. They had a team continuous censoring all honest discussion on their videos. I find the whole phenomenon around Beast to be gross.
Interestingly, this HN post is now on page 3 with ~300 points in an hour. Which probably means it's been flagged a bunch of times if I understand the HN ranking algorithm. Either that or the mod team has demoted it but that doesn't seem likely in this case.
I agree, but at least it was possible to tell he probably plays fast and loose with the truth and would probably do almost anything for more money or more applause simply by watching a few minutes of his videos, or at least that was my experience.
As I get older and gain first-hand experience in the orbit of some extremely successful people, I'm starting to realize that what I believed about how to succeed appears to be quite the opposite of what I've believed for most of my life, at least anecdotally. I've been bummed to realize how manipulative and dishonest the most successful people I've known have tended to be. I think hard work, integrity, conscientiousness, etc will get you pretty far in life, but there seems to be a certain threshold level of success that starts to favor the Machiavellian types.
I'm finding these allegations of "fraud" to be extremely convoluted and all over the map, sharing more with internet conspiracy theorizing than sober allegations of specific harms. Some of the issues in the video and elsewhere, present longstanding staples of junk food marketing (e.g. cash prizes, vacations) as if they're in the category of crimes, which is nonsense and shows no sense of proportionality.
I also think the linked video got pretty ridiculous pointing to CGI explosions or edited in buildings evidence of "faked videos" when I think, again, not crime, and not even importantly misleading in the sense people usually are talking about when talking about faked videos: e.g. bigfoot being a guy in a costume. The kind of thing I would consider violating the contract with the viewer would be something more like integrity of outcomes in competitions.
Which is to say, the community of critics are some of the worst cases of deep friend internet brain imaginable, spinning narratives in a Trump-style "weave" [0] that can't decide what the issue is, and can't differentiate between importantly different categories of harm. Most of the time it's vague characterizations of "shady" without elaboration, which itself signals the kind of vagueness that people mistakenly think constitute a completely expressed idea.
That's why this article, at least, by contrast is able to coherently articulate a harm, but even that is fringey, pertaining to pinned comments did not comply with "CARU’s Ad Guidelines’." But at least, it models what it looks like to present a coherently stated harm.
I think MrBeast is a very good way to tell my child that “not everything you see on the internet is true”, cue the “But why would he lie?”, “Because he wants you to keep watching his videos.”
Even if 215M in revenue on chocolate bars suggests that they might be perfectly capable of funding all their $5K and $10k givaways.
We've explained this all to our son at length and he's ended up fairly anti-Mr Beast. Problem is that other kids and their parents are convinced he's a swell guy and not marketing directly to them.
This has been a great learning experience for our son about how the average person doesn't question what is happening or why.
Somewhere I hope there is a third kind of child who neither likes nor dislikes Mr Beast because of his content but who merely recognizes him for what he is, and opts in to the videos they seem likely to be entertained by while opting out of the videos they seem unlikely to be entertained by
His videos are obviously entertaining until you realize (for me it was a post few years ago here) how cruel they are. With likes of Squid Game you realize it is all fake. IMO few more years and YouTube will deplatform or deboost him.
SPOILER - Three Body Problem (book, series on Netflix)
I love the scene where the human tells the aliens that humans sometimes lie and the aliens conclude that humans can never be trusted so they break communication.
How would such civilization even survive to discover a wheel if it can't recognize lie or misinformation. Even animals are able to lie - that's what mimicry and camouflage is all about.
Imagination is also form of a lie. You are making stuff up in your head. Without imagination you don't have innovation. Without innovation you are stuck in cave scavenging whatever you can find.
Trisolarans did evolve under much different selection pressure that requires effective mass coordination to dehydrate when deemed necessary for civilization's survival. That would probably select for rigid adherence to rules of communication vs critically evaluating every interaction. Or else you'd get a lot of "But am I being tricked into dehydrating to steal my belongings and take my job at the sophon factory? No thanks, I'll pass."
But how would progress work like that? If you are essentially an ant colony adhering to rules, how do you want to invent anything at all? The moment when you start being different through innovation, you are not following the rigid rule system and other members of your species will kill you.
That makes no sense either. Evolution means that this change happened gradually over the time. However the moment you have a group which is always honest and believes you and group which is allowed to lie, then the lying group will take over the honest group. To lie and manipulate is a massive advantage.
I just pass on this video from a former Mr Beast employee that tends to open people’s eyes up. Mr Beast has tried every tactic to bury and suppress this. In particular deleting all mention of it on any social media where his team can delete comments / replies.
That video ended up having a bunch of factual errors though. It's a definite mix of real problems and rumours/gossip that comes across as someone having an axe to grind with their former employer. I don't particularly like Mr. Beast or his schtick (probably too old to find him appealing, honestly) but this isn't a slam dunk. The deleting comments/replies thing is basic large corporation behaviour, which is what Mr. Beast Inc. is a the end of the day.
It's not just kids. MrBeast had me convinced he has a perfectly good business model making more money than he gives away without having to pull shady things. And with me plenty of reasonable adults judging from his interactions with public figures.
Kids? how many people try and pay IRS debt with Apple Gift Cards? How many people just dumbly trust sales people? Its best they learn at this early age rather than later in life when they grifted for $1000s.
> remarkable how credulous kids are for these things
Is it though? We're talking about kids whose brains aren't fully developed yet. IMO there's a certain genius in marketing to kids, as they are far more likely to buy wholesale into what you're selling. MrBeast probably does the best job but if you look through kids Youtube there are some really shady folks out there that just make videos designed to suck kids in, and just based off their view counts you can tell they are making disgusting amounts of money off AdSense.
Not really. Algorithmic pushes have made it look like if it's popular, it's credible. This credibility is entirely engineered. Same reason why kids die from TikTok challenges.
The way this is written makes it sound like you think there's an algorithm saying "if bad person: then boost".
The credibility is ranking. The ranking is a function of engagement. The engagement is a function of human nature. Things delightful, shocking, or unusual usually strike that chord. Sprinkle capitalism into the mix and people become professionally delightful, shocking, or unusual.
I don't think the ranking algorithms are the problem here.
You're blowing right past the question of whether the result of successful dark patterns is legitimate engagement. It's a computer. It's got nothing better to do than run a better algorithm to avoid that outcome.
I didn’t read it that way. Algorithms select for optimizing engagement. People whose brains have not fully developed are incapable of reliably distinguishing fiction presented as fact vs reality, especially when there is intentional deception. Combine those and you get engaging content that can influence a portion of the population with limited defense mechanisms against it.
This is also why minors can’t sign contracts, why broadcasts television used to only show more mature content after prime time, and all of the other ways children have historically been protected.
One could argue though, that the idea of abusing human brains weaknesses like "engagement" is the problem here, and a ranking algorithm is just the implementation du jour of the basic evil concept.
As far as I can see this is a non-Governmental non-profit doing this. So it has no legal
merit. Can’t tell if this is the ad industry attempting to self-regulate? The Wikipedia articles are quite mealy.
> As far as I can see this is a non-Governmental non-profit doing this. So it has no legal merit.
It has no legal weight. Lave of legal merit is a feature of a legal argument and is missing if the argument improperly represents the law, not if it comes from a source that doesn’t provide it legal weight. (Since you later say you agree with it. that is equivalent to saying that, insofar as it is a legal argument, that argument does have legal merit.)
> Can’t tell if this is the ad industry attempting to self-regulate?
No, it is a non-advertising industry non-profit doing research and reporting to the public, which potentially puts political pressure on government actors (State Attorneys-General and, maybe, the FTC) to take action (it could also provide ammunition for private lawsuits, except COPPA doesn’t provide a private cause of action.)
Note that a part of COPPA regulation is a Safe Harbor provision which involves industry self-regulation and certification, but that only protects against FTC, not state, action.
Indeed. It's one of those "we joined this program so now you all can see we are very committed to ensure our consumers are well protected" non-profit organisations.
Yeah, ironically, it's the BBB, which used to rate businesses based in part on how much the business paid them (without disclosing this to consumers, of course).
Pretty much every Youtube channel has at one point or another failed to disclose advertising. For a good while they were all doing it and sponsored videos containing sponsored content were entirely undeclared. Its a lot less common now presumably there is some enforcement now but I still see it quite often.
I disagree that that standards should be higher - just the penalties. Small YouTubers shouldn't be able to get away with being corporate mouthpieces without declaration just because of their size.
I believe trusting any person whose incentive is to take money from you is not a prudent decision.
This happens a lot if you make your purchase decisions based on influenzas promoting certain items.
> I believe trusting any person whose incentive is to take money from you is not a prudent decision.
I simply do not see the correlation. There are many people in the world that want to make money and do so by providing a great product at an affordable price (eg. Gabe Newell). Perhaps it is better to say you shouldn't trust people that who give you something for free to make money off you.
I think Steam gets a little too much leeway. They continue to enable "skins gambling" and recently started[1] selling "microtransactions" in the thousands of dollars to capitalize on the "skins" market. Is that a "great product at an affordable price"?
To be fair that is a lot of professions: lawyers, accountants, doctors, dentists, car mechanics. All could advise you need a service you don’t really need but maximises their revenue.
Except a decent number of those examples have legally binding oaths not to screw you. And if they are found to have screwed you, are barred from their profession and have to pay you a lot of money. Maybe that should be more common.
This isn't a Mr Beast problem, it's a industry problem:
> Frontiers: How Much Influencer Marketing Is Undisclosed? Evidence from Twitter
> We study the disclosure of influencer posts on Twitter across a large set of brands based on a unique data set of over 100 million posts and a novel classification method to detect undisclosed sponsorship. Using our preferred empirical specification, we find that 96% of sponsored posts are not disclosed. This result is robust to a series of specification tests, and even a lower-bound classification still yields an undisclosed share of 82%. Despite stronger enforcement of disclosure regulations, the share of undisclosed posts decreases only slightly over time. *Compared with disclosed posts, undisclosed posts tend to be associated with young brands with a large Twitter following. Using an online survey, we find that many consumers are not able to identify sponsored content without disclosure.* Our findings highlight a potential need for further regulatory scrutiny and suggest that researchers studying influencers must account for undisclosed sponsored content.
The original title is almost double the maximum length for HN titles, and it’s confusingly dry. “Children's Advertising Review Unit” does sound like it could be a government entity. I do agree the current title could be slightly misleading, but hopefully there is a middle ground. I don’t have a suggestion offhand, but if you do, HN moderators do tend to take user suggestions into account in these cases.
Luckily my children have all avoided these specific scammers, Mr Beast, Logan Paul, etc. But I keep my eye on the space a bit and I am appalled at how common and easy it is for these grifters to scam children.
Almost all of the content I have seen become popular have been highly toxic "relationships" with their audience. It's happening and pretty bad for non-children content, but it's happening worse and shouldn't be happening at all for childrens content.
I mean, we get it, they are a high-margin audience traditionally. Selling garbage to kids makes big bucks. Kids are dumb and they buy stupid things for non-existent reasons. That's why traditionally we have had more laws to protect them and been more vigilant about it. It seems like we've seriously slipped and just kind of thrown our hands in the air and concluded "I guess kids have to get scammed over and over"
Why is the title of the post here on HN so substantially different from the actual press release? The HN post tries to make it personal, claiming an individual is doing it, while the press release (correctly) refers to the companies. That seems an impotent distinction that the HN headline carefully erases.
It’s not that strong. Evil isn’t just genocide. It would be evil of me to go around leaving trays full of beer outside just to drown slugs in them. It would be evil of me to shove razors into candy apples and hand them out at Halloween.
Not all evil has to be some grand world-level conspiracy and it can still be evil.
I disagree, the findings clearly show it as active malice rather than naive incompetence. From their findings, the company clearly did think about this stuff and tried to tick boxes while actively going around the rules.
> In MrBeast’s 2024 Halloween sweepstakes, Feastables encouraged participants to submit up to 24 entries daily until October 30 for a chance to win $10,000, with a grand prize of $1,000,000 on Halloween Day. The ad copy stated, “$10,000 USD Daily Winner. Enter with Purchase Through October 30.” In very small print was the disclaimer, “No purchase necessary, Click below for details.” The official rules stated that participants must be at least 13 years old with parental permission and entrants under 13 are not allowed.
That shows they clearly were aware of the fact they must have a "no purchase necessary" option, because they added it into the small print. They then actively pushed the "with purchase" line everywhere else.
They knew what they should be doing and then did everything they could to do otherwise to sell more product.
is there a name for the phenomenon where you get so tired of seeing someones face pop up over and over and over that you start to hate the person and despite their good deeds feel no remorse for them when they end up in trouble?
I think in MrBeast's case it goes beyond just overexposure to seeming like a sketchy guy because of how hard he tries to project the image of being a good person while simultaneously flaunting his wealth.
It's very reminiscent of many crypto-scammers, who flaunted their wealth and talked about wanting to help others become wealthy too, only to eventually rug pull.
I don't think he's flaunting wealth per se. He doesn't claim to be wealthy. If anything he claims the opposite, always talking about how he immediately reinvests everything and keeps barely anything for himself or as a reserve.
But he is definetly flaunting something. I'd maybe label it as flaunting generosity, or the ability to change people's lifes
He is heavily involved with both Logan Paul and KSI. And while those two haven't built their career around crypto scams the label "crypto scammer" has been used for both of them
I don't know much about him, but he does lots of stuff about bringing water to places in Africa and curing blindness or deafness as well from what I've seen. Not sure of the ratio of what to what.
This is not how you judge character. Character is what you do when you have nothing to gain or even something to lose. These are merely performances for YouTube videos that help his brand and generate millions of views. Adults at least should be aware of this, because this is how you get scammed.
OP never used the word "character." They asked about good deeds, which appears to be about the action, whereas character is about the intention of the person. If MrBeast cured your blindness and he did it solely to make money and doesn't care about you at all, you still got your blindness cured. If I volunteer at the soup kitchen just to meet women, I have failing character but I still did the good deed. This is the MrBeast dilemma: what are we to conclude when the two are in opposition? What does it mean when someone does a good deed in order to benefit from it themselves? Is that a win-win situation, or is it bad? Does it completely negate the good deed? These are generally unsettled questions in our culture.
Based on the context they were obviously judging their character based off their "good deeds". You are just circling around the obvious. As for this "dilemma", he has already shown he will exploit children.
This tells you who he is and what his incentives are. If you would like to believe otherwise go for it. My advice simply is to watch out in real life for people you think are good if this is how you judge people.
His philantrophy videos underperform compared to his other videos, typically getting 10-30% fewer views than the worst performing video right before or after.
Maybe you could argue that they aren't financially lucrative but at least help his brand. But he seems to get a lot of hate for making those videos. I suspect his brand would be much better if he stuck to making highly produced challenge and contest style videos
Now there are three worlds we could live in: In the first I am misjudging his videos and they are actually good for his brand or finances. That's the one you suspect. In the second they are bad for his brand but he perceives them as helping him. Quite possible, even if he seems to have reasonably good self reflection. In the third they are bad for his brand and finances but he wouldn't be able to finance projects of this scopes without the videos and sponsorships. That's what MrBeast claims to be true
I don't know which of those is true, all three of them seem likely to me
>His philantrophy videos underperform compared to his other videos, typically getting 10-30% fewer views than the worst performing video right before or after.
Doesn't matter. We are literally having this discussion because of the very fact that he has chosen to make these videos. This tells you how effective it is for his brand. More than likely it is a net-positive even if he does get criticism.
We wouldn't be in our current political situation if adults were aware of this. The average person is well below what we usually assume the average is.
Whatever he does is for show first and foremost and only. Whatever benefits other people gain in the process is always less than what he will gain from the views. It's very much not a charity although he sells it like one.
I'm sorry for the previous rambling. The word I was looking for is Exploitation. That's what it is. Making a show about poor people while it gets you rich as F. It's just wrong.
There is a way to give money and stuff away for good causes and it's not to put up a show, then pack up and never return to see check that what you did actually helped. What he's doing is a lottery, making poor people win to capture their immediate sentiments. It's totally artificial and done for the wrong reasons which can have a number of negative outcomes that you'll never hear about because it's a closed process. Would you consider lotto a charity?
This was his older content. Ever since his squid game video his videos are larger-than-life with elaborate sets, flying to crazy destinations, etc. The simple giving cars away, or giving a house to a pizza delivery guy, or reading the bee moving script is long over.
One point about giving away cars - it’s not always to someone else’s detriment. He once gave someone ~30 used cars and they had to give them all away (to friends, family, randoms) within 24hours to earn a Tesla for himself.
In a weird way he is turning into the squid game villain himself. He stole their look for his henchmen and also takes on the persona. Almost every video he has made since would fit right in that world.
This is not an era for long-term effort. This is about moving very fast breaking things and growing as fast as possible , so that when it all goes bust you can still leave with a cushy fortune. This culture is everywhere now, from arts to business
<Blank> Degrangement Syndrome, I think MrBeast has definitely reached that status by the rabid amount of hate he gets whenever brought up here or on reddit.
I'm not saying he doesn't deserve the feedback he's receiving right now. Just saying whatever you want to call this phenomena, its what i'm experiencing. He would have been a lot more likeable if he wasn't so aggressive in self promotion but I've heard him boast about it on podcasts and I think he knows what he was doing
On a related note, I'm terrified of typing his name into search or watching any of his videos because once yt thinks I'm interested in the "topic" I'll never be able to get rid of his face from my recommended videos or news suggestions. I have his channel blocked but I suspect that if you watch a blocked channel voluntarily they will treat it as an unblock.
The problem is the copycat and adjacent channels. You watch and block $BOZO, you now get suggestions for $BOZO reacts, $BOZO extras, $BOZO clips, and all of $BOZO's competitor channels.
Overexposure. Desensitization. Regardless, someone doing something good doesn't excuse them when they do something bad. You can be a civil rights icon who improved the lives of millions of people, but when you stand around, watch, and give advice as your buddy rapes a woman, you are a piece of shit.
When it comes to people that wealthy, the money they're using for their "good deeds" are the bare minimum they think they need to get you off their case. So when you say "I don't think someone should be a billionaire, that means something has gone seriously wrong" they can point to how he filmed himself giving a homeless guy a house.
In the case of MrBeast it's not even really reputation laundering, he's just an algorithm goblin who iterated through different shticks until landing on giveaways and contests as the things which consistently brought in the most clicks. I don't think he was even that rich when he started doing them, as far as I can tell his first ever prize was just two $50 iTunes gift cards while still recording in his bedroom, and after that it wasn't long until nearly all of his content revolved around giveaways.
> down to A/B testing a hundred different thumbnail variants for every video
To be fair, this is apparently table stakes for being a YouTuber at the moment. Maybe not hundreds but definitely several. Veritasium did a video [0] about how he has to do this to maintain enough viewership to keep YouTubing viable as a full-time job.
It makes sense though. Or to put it another way, it seems odd to expect that there's always a global thumbnail optimum for a given YouTube video.
So to bring in the most views, put out different thumbnails to attract different viewers. Ideally YouTube would have support for this where you can just upload a dozen thumbnails or so, and YouTube figure out who needs to see which.
Eh, Veritasium is now majority owned by PE now (Electrify). This is why they’ve been introducing new hosts and Derek is doing more intros / voiceovers - the end goal removing reliance on the original channel owner.
So does he need to do it to remain profitable or does PE need to do it to pay for all their overhead / etc?
Ah interesting, didn't know that. The video is at least 4 years old, so suppose it depends on when Derek sold. Anecdotally, I think all the new hosts came after that thumbnail video, but I couldn't say how closely the changes you mention followed.
In general, it seems this is a thing that YouTubers feel they need to do to avoid being swallowed, but the extent to which MrBeast does it could well be extreme, and thereby worthy of suspicion.
It’s not that difficult to become a billionaire. If you can collect $1 dollar from a billion people, you’ll be a billionaire. If you increase that to $10, you only need 100 million people, roughly a third of the United States.
What you need is some kind of platform on which you could collect those dollars. In recent history the internet has become a powerful platform and that is why we have so many more billionaires.
But what has not changed is our sensitivity to good deeds. If you’re a billionaire, giving all your wealth away is not really going to be appreciated much more than doing some highly visible good deeds that give smaller amounts of wealth away. So why do it? There is diminishing returns for good deeds. You’re better off staying a billionaire until you die, after which your wealth will be distributed anyway.
Getting $1 from a single person is already a challenge. Automating that is incredibly hard and clearly not something you can do alone, and if you don't do it alone then everybody gets a cut, including your bank, IRS, etc.
If you're a billionaire, you don't feel the need to win the unaffected public's affections. You just do good because you have the resources to do it and can derive satisfaction from the people who are benefiting. You don't get to being ruthless enough to become a billionaire if you're dependent on what uninvolved strangers think of you. If you were, you'd be giving it all away well before piling up enough to become a billionaire.
People just vastly overestimate the power of money at scale. There is more power and inspiration in doing highly visible good deeds that people will see and feel good about than just cutting checks to large groups of people. It takes a billionaire to truly understand this.
> If you’re a billionaire, giving all your wealth away is not really going to be appreciated much more than doing some highly visible good deeds that give smaller amounts of wealth away. So why do it?
You could do it for the intrinsic satisfaction of being a decent human and creating a better world. Could probably end or avoid a few wars, too. You’d certainly go into the annals of history is you eradicated poverty in whole areas of the world (which you could easily do, as a billionaire).
> It’s not that difficult to become a billionaire.
Please show us. Then give all your money away and see how that worked out. Don’t knock it until you try it. If you later regret it, that’s OK, shouldn’t be that difficult to become a billionaire again.
The goodness isn’t in giving all the money away, but in the positive change you can induce while making even a fraction of it available to a worthy cause. Obviously you wouldn’t create a better world by giving your money away to another billionaire or Polluting Genociders Inc, but if you engage in good faith and steel man the argument you can surely find some examples you’d agree with, such as preventing wars for resources and saving people from painful slow deaths due to starvation. Can we agree those are positive things? That working towards improving the lives of others without expecting a return makes one a better person?
Consider this: A billionaire (not even a multibillionaire, just one on the “lower end”) who gave away $1 a second would be giving away $86400 a day. Sounds like a lot, until you realise it would still take them 32 years to give it all away, and that’s assuming they wouldn’t be making any money in the meantime.
Now consider the number of people living in extreme poverty.
Please stray from the meta "why am I downvoted!". It's low-effort, reddit-esque commentary that only serves yourself. You can edit your other comment.
You're being downvoted because you're not responding to the comment in earnest. The comment says,
"You could do it for the intrinsic satisfaction of being a decent human and creating a better world."
Obviously, that implies good intention. Your contrarian take sidesteps this for no real reason: you present no argument other than being contrarian for contrarian-sake. Maybe try explaning why you think the logic is flawed.
Frankly I disagree and am pointing out the obvious subtext.
if giving all my money away leads to "the intrinsic satisfaction of being a decent human and creating a better world."
Then it's not much of a step or even a leap to go the other way with it. If I horde all my money or even don't give it all away, then I will be denied that intrinsic satisfaction because I'm not a decent human or creating a better world.
Do you think we're extrapolating too much into the meaning of "decent human"?
His logic is not flawed to anyone who thinks about it:
1. You have to be a shitty human being to become a billionaire.
2. If you give away all your money, you’re not a shitty human being.
3. But if you’re not a shitty human being, how could you have become a billionaire in the first place?
Can you quote this thread where somebody said any of that?
If you can't, can you explain how you came to those conclusions?
And finally, what are you trying to "win," and why? lol
You're arguing against points no one made. No one in this immediate thread, at least. No one here said you have to be shitty to be a billionaire, or that giving money away stops you from being shitty.
Please don’t straw man. Engage with the arguments in earnest, with what the person said, not what you imagine they said.
Say you asked “what’s the point of running? Why should I do it every day? I’ll only get tired” and I answer “you could do it for the intrinsic satisfaction of pushing yourself, out of love for the sport, to be healthier, to become an athlete”. Do you understand that to mean “anyone who doesn’t run every day is unhealthy, not an athlete, and doesn‘t love sports”? Hopefully not, that would be ridiculous. All that’s needed is to point at a swimmer or a cyclist as a counter example.
So yes, you are extrapolating too much. Saying “doing this is good or decent” does not automatically mean “not doing this is bad or indecent”. You are not reading some “obvious subtext” (as you put it in another comment), you’re making up beliefs and ascribing negative intentions to complete strangers.
This is whataboutism. Just because they are also doing it doesn't mean its okay to do at all. It just means that Mr. Beast is the one being focused on here, and that other organizations will have to wait their turn.
I guess its good that this is drawing some light on the subject, but nothing will happen.
Even if MrBeast were to be investigated by a government agency for similar issues, his business links to noted Trump sycophant Chamath Palihapitiya would shield him from any consequences for his actions.
It’s funny how he’s admired by Chamath and other Silicon Valley types for his entrepreneurship or good deeds or whatever when the core of how his channel works is deceiving viewers
Yeah people can barely see past the length of their own nose.
Its a marketing experiment basically. I think a bunch of people coalesced to answer the question. "So, how could we completely wipe the leaderboard in terms of views/attention and dethrone an entire cohort of competitors in the quest for dominance over people's attention?"
In the process they completely pulled out all stops, if it bleeds it leads, save the children, high risk stunts, and psychological knee jerks. Out of nowhere they play minecraft too? Of course, its popular so, why not. The ends justifies the means. Of course, all influencers do this to a point, but none are so systematic, diversified and approach the question with so many types of content.
The point is that despite their deliberately confusing decision to have the word "Bureau" in their name, they have absolutely nothing to do with the government or anything official. They are as official as JD Power, Consumer Reports or Yelp. I wonder how many millions of people continue to be fooled by their deceptive name?
So if you donate money to charity then you get a pass on obeying the law and general morals? Is this like indulgences from the Pope? How much does a murder cost?
Well, yes, actually. That does seem to be the way of the world. Look how many 1%ers only make donations based on PR recommendations to keep their image in good standing. Funny you made a Pope joke, but it is common for people attending the Church to pay donations for absolution. As for your murder cost question, I guess that depends on which ad in the back of Soldier of Fortune you replied.
If I go out and randomly punch someone in the face but buy a homeless person dinner, hey, I did something good, but maybe I still shouldn't have done the former.
Yea but he’s not exactly going around randomly punching people in the face is he? Lot of moral grandstanding in this thread.
He’s a human being and he’s not perfect but some of these comments calling him a psychopath or sycophant are going way too far. My psychoanalysis of everyone psychoanalyzing Mr Beast would be to turn the screen off and get some fresh air
Actions have a statistical inevitability to them. I don't think it's much different than going out and randomly punching people in the face.
When you have a lot of money and influence, and you have a choice between two policies: policy A which will statistically harm 1,000 people, and policy B which will statistically harm 1,500 people, it is no different, to me, than going around randomly punching 500 people you never had to.
For some reason people give these choices a pass. I don't.
I might give Mr. Beast a bit of a pass because there might be some ignorance involved. But for most people making these decisions, that live within large corporations, I don't, because they know better, they just don't care.
"In September 2024, Donaldson was one of the subjects of a class action lawsuit that alleged widespread mistreatment, sexual harassment, and unpaid expenses and wages on his ongoing reality television series."
Not really, no. There is extensive documentation showing his charity is way less than it appears to be, and selling overpriced unhealthy garbage to children negates what little goodwill he may have gained through it, in my book.
Does anyone remember when this person who worked for Mr Beast outed their fraudulent tactics? You couldn’t bring it up in a comment on their videos at all. They had a team continuous censoring all honest discussion on their videos. I find the whole phenomenon around Beast to be gross.
https://youtu.be/k5xf40KrK3I
Interestingly, this HN post is now on page 3 with ~300 points in an hour. Which probably means it's been flagged a bunch of times if I understand the HN ranking algorithm. Either that or the mod team has demoted it but that doesn't seem likely in this case.
You might like this: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/c4CEVtUx1fg
I agree, but at least it was possible to tell he probably plays fast and loose with the truth and would probably do almost anything for more money or more applause simply by watching a few minutes of his videos, or at least that was my experience.
As I get older and gain first-hand experience in the orbit of some extremely successful people, I'm starting to realize that what I believed about how to succeed appears to be quite the opposite of what I've believed for most of my life, at least anecdotally. I've been bummed to realize how manipulative and dishonest the most successful people I've known have tended to be. I think hard work, integrity, conscientiousness, etc will get you pretty far in life, but there seems to be a certain threshold level of success that starts to favor the Machiavellian types.
> I Worked For MrBeast, He's A Fraud
He learned from the master lol. Missing a wide-eyed surprised face thumbnail though.
I mean not a lot of people are out there making "I Worked for ________, They Were Awesome & I Was the One Who Sucked" videos, right?
I mean if you would have watched the videos you’d have seen that the points he makes are quite valid. Also you are “judging a book by its cover”.
> the points he makes are quite valid
Do you know they're valid or do you like to believe they're valid?
I'm finding these allegations of "fraud" to be extremely convoluted and all over the map, sharing more with internet conspiracy theorizing than sober allegations of specific harms. Some of the issues in the video and elsewhere, present longstanding staples of junk food marketing (e.g. cash prizes, vacations) as if they're in the category of crimes, which is nonsense and shows no sense of proportionality.
I also think the linked video got pretty ridiculous pointing to CGI explosions or edited in buildings evidence of "faked videos" when I think, again, not crime, and not even importantly misleading in the sense people usually are talking about when talking about faked videos: e.g. bigfoot being a guy in a costume. The kind of thing I would consider violating the contract with the viewer would be something more like integrity of outcomes in competitions.
Which is to say, the community of critics are some of the worst cases of deep friend internet brain imaginable, spinning narratives in a Trump-style "weave" [0] that can't decide what the issue is, and can't differentiate between importantly different categories of harm. Most of the time it's vague characterizations of "shady" without elaboration, which itself signals the kind of vagueness that people mistakenly think constitute a completely expressed idea.
That's why this article, at least, by contrast is able to coherently articulate a harm, but even that is fringey, pertaining to pinned comments did not comply with "CARU’s Ad Guidelines’." But at least, it models what it looks like to present a coherently stated harm.
0: The Weave: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/01/us/elections/trump-speech...
I think MrBeast is a very good way to tell my child that “not everything you see on the internet is true”, cue the “But why would he lie?”, “Because he wants you to keep watching his videos.”
Even if 215M in revenue on chocolate bars suggests that they might be perfectly capable of funding all their $5K and $10k givaways.
We've explained this all to our son at length and he's ended up fairly anti-Mr Beast. Problem is that other kids and their parents are convinced he's a swell guy and not marketing directly to them.
This has been a great learning experience for our son about how the average person doesn't question what is happening or why.
Somewhere I hope there is a third kind of child who neither likes nor dislikes Mr Beast because of his content but who merely recognizes him for what he is, and opts in to the videos they seem likely to be entertained by while opting out of the videos they seem unlikely to be entertained by
His videos are obviously entertaining until you realize (for me it was a post few years ago here) how cruel they are. With likes of Squid Game you realize it is all fake. IMO few more years and YouTube will deplatform or deboost him.
No way. As long as he brings views in, YouTube will boost him. They only care about ad money.
> merely recognizes him for what he is
Haven't you seen the way his smile never touches his eyes? Anybody who recognizes MrBeast for what he is should be running in the opposite direction.
My children find the videos entertaining. That’s our sum opinion of Mr Beast
> But why would he lie?”
SPOILER - Three Body Problem (book, series on Netflix)
I love the scene where the human tells the aliens that humans sometimes lie and the aliens conclude that humans can never be trusted so they break communication.
That was really good twist in the book.
It made me think a lot what a normal Trisolaran conversation or exchange of information look like? How does a civilization evolve in this case?
How would such civilization even survive to discover a wheel if it can't recognize lie or misinformation. Even animals are able to lie - that's what mimicry and camouflage is all about.
Imagination is also form of a lie. You are making stuff up in your head. Without imagination you don't have innovation. Without innovation you are stuck in cave scavenging whatever you can find.
Trisolarans did evolve under much different selection pressure that requires effective mass coordination to dehydrate when deemed necessary for civilization's survival. That would probably select for rigid adherence to rules of communication vs critically evaluating every interaction. Or else you'd get a lot of "But am I being tricked into dehydrating to steal my belongings and take my job at the sophon factory? No thanks, I'll pass."
But how would progress work like that? If you are essentially an ant colony adhering to rules, how do you want to invent anything at all? The moment when you start being different through innovation, you are not following the rigid rule system and other members of your species will kill you.
They could have evolved with lies, developed the tech, then branched off into honesty later.
That makes no sense either. Evolution means that this change happened gradually over the time. However the moment you have a group which is always honest and believes you and group which is allowed to lie, then the lying group will take over the honest group. To lie and manipulate is a massive advantage.
In general, self defense is evolutionarily necessary or you'll get wiped out. Recall the stable state of the prisoners dilemma
Enjoyed it ans well. Ended the age of cultural exchange.
I just pass on this video from a former Mr Beast employee that tends to open people’s eyes up. Mr Beast has tried every tactic to bury and suppress this. In particular deleting all mention of it on any social media where his team can delete comments / replies.
https://youtu.be/k5xf40KrK3I
That video ended up having a bunch of factual errors though. It's a definite mix of real problems and rumours/gossip that comes across as someone having an axe to grind with their former employer. I don't particularly like Mr. Beast or his schtick (probably too old to find him appealing, honestly) but this isn't a slam dunk. The deleting comments/replies thing is basic large corporation behaviour, which is what Mr. Beast Inc. is a the end of the day.
> I think MrBeast is a very good way to tell my child that “not everything you see on the internet is true”
Also a good way to teach your child that being a fraud can make you a lot of money.
Sadly.
It really is remarkable how credulous kids are for these things, especially for some reason Mr. Beast. Good, but painful, lesson for them
It's not just kids. MrBeast had me convinced he has a perfectly good business model making more money than he gives away without having to pull shady things. And with me plenty of reasonable adults judging from his interactions with public figures.
I think it's awesome that you can admit that kind of thing. You make the world a little better with that.
Do you say his giveaways are fake?
Kids? how many people try and pay IRS debt with Apple Gift Cards? How many people just dumbly trust sales people? Its best they learn at this early age rather than later in life when they grifted for $1000s.
Cut out the middle man. Scam you own kids to teach them a lesson…
"I cheat my boys every chance I get. I want to make 'em sharp."
- William Rockefeller Sr.
> remarkable how credulous kids are for these things
Is it though? We're talking about kids whose brains aren't fully developed yet. IMO there's a certain genius in marketing to kids, as they are far more likely to buy wholesale into what you're selling. MrBeast probably does the best job but if you look through kids Youtube there are some really shady folks out there that just make videos designed to suck kids in, and just based off their view counts you can tell they are making disgusting amounts of money off AdSense.
To be fair, it's been like this forever.
"not a flying toy"
Not really. Algorithmic pushes have made it look like if it's popular, it's credible. This credibility is entirely engineered. Same reason why kids die from TikTok challenges.
The way this is written makes it sound like you think there's an algorithm saying "if bad person: then boost".
The credibility is ranking. The ranking is a function of engagement. The engagement is a function of human nature. Things delightful, shocking, or unusual usually strike that chord. Sprinkle capitalism into the mix and people become professionally delightful, shocking, or unusual.
I don't think the ranking algorithms are the problem here.
You're blowing right past the question of whether the result of successful dark patterns is legitimate engagement. It's a computer. It's got nothing better to do than run a better algorithm to avoid that outcome.
> The way this is written makes it sound like you think there's an algorithm saying "if bad person: then boost".
Not so directly, but that's the effective result.
I didn’t read it that way. Algorithms select for optimizing engagement. People whose brains have not fully developed are incapable of reliably distinguishing fiction presented as fact vs reality, especially when there is intentional deception. Combine those and you get engaging content that can influence a portion of the population with limited defense mechanisms against it.
This is also why minors can’t sign contracts, why broadcasts television used to only show more mature content after prime time, and all of the other ways children have historically been protected.
This isn’t about capitalism among equal parties.
One could argue though, that the idea of abusing human brains weaknesses like "engagement" is the problem here, and a ranking algorithm is just the implementation du jour of the basic evil concept.
The thing about grifters, scammers and con artists is that they’re professionals.
As far as I can see this is a non-Governmental non-profit doing this. So it has no legal merit. Can’t tell if this is the ad industry attempting to self-regulate? The Wikipedia articles are quite mealy.
I do tend to agree with the findings, regardless.
> As far as I can see this is a non-Governmental non-profit doing this. So it has no legal merit.
It has no legal weight. Lave of legal merit is a feature of a legal argument and is missing if the argument improperly represents the law, not if it comes from a source that doesn’t provide it legal weight. (Since you later say you agree with it. that is equivalent to saying that, insofar as it is a legal argument, that argument does have legal merit.)
> Can’t tell if this is the ad industry attempting to self-regulate?
No, it is a non-advertising industry non-profit doing research and reporting to the public, which potentially puts political pressure on government actors (State Attorneys-General and, maybe, the FTC) to take action (it could also provide ammunition for private lawsuits, except COPPA doesn’t provide a private cause of action.)
Note that a part of COPPA regulation is a Safe Harbor provision which involves industry self-regulation and certification, but that only protects against FTC, not state, action.
Ooo, never knew those words actually had different meanings in the legal context. Appreciate it :).
> Lave of legal merit
Lack?
https://bbbprograms.org/about?faq=%5B_IsBBBNationalProgramsa...
Indeed. It's one of those "we joined this program so now you all can see we are very committed to ensure our consumers are well protected" non-profit organisations.
Yeah, ironically, it's the BBB, which used to rate businesses based in part on how much the business paid them (without disclosing this to consumers, of course).
https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/business-bureau-best-ratings-...
Yeah the bbb continues to act like a federal agency even though its just a private group
Pretty much every Youtube channel has at one point or another failed to disclose advertising. For a good while they were all doing it and sponsored videos containing sponsored content were entirely undeclared. Its a lot less common now presumably there is some enforcement now but I still see it quite often.
MrBeast is not just a YouTube channel but a huge business/brand and should be held accountable at much higher standards.
I disagree that that standards should be higher - just the penalties. Small YouTubers shouldn't be able to get away with being corporate mouthpieces without declaration just because of their size.
I believe trusting any person whose incentive is to take money from you is not a prudent decision. This happens a lot if you make your purchase decisions based on influenzas promoting certain items.
> I believe trusting any person whose incentive is to take money from you is not a prudent decision.
I simply do not see the correlation. There are many people in the world that want to make money and do so by providing a great product at an affordable price (eg. Gabe Newell). Perhaps it is better to say you shouldn't trust people that who give you something for free to make money off you.
I think Steam gets a little too much leeway. They continue to enable "skins gambling" and recently started[1] selling "microtransactions" in the thousands of dollars to capitalize on the "skins" market. Is that a "great product at an affordable price"?
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1njds9z/counterstri...
To be fair that is a lot of professions: lawyers, accountants, doctors, dentists, car mechanics. All could advise you need a service you don’t really need but maximises their revenue.
Except a decent number of those examples have legally binding oaths not to screw you. And if they are found to have screwed you, are barred from their profession and have to pay you a lot of money. Maybe that should be more common.
Car mechanics and dentists do that all the time. I have not much experience with others.
This isn't a Mr Beast problem, it's a industry problem:
> Frontiers: How Much Influencer Marketing Is Undisclosed? Evidence from Twitter
> We study the disclosure of influencer posts on Twitter across a large set of brands based on a unique data set of over 100 million posts and a novel classification method to detect undisclosed sponsorship. Using our preferred empirical specification, we find that 96% of sponsored posts are not disclosed. This result is robust to a series of specification tests, and even a lower-bound classification still yields an undisclosed share of 82%. Despite stronger enforcement of disclosure regulations, the share of undisclosed posts decreases only slightly over time. *Compared with disclosed posts, undisclosed posts tend to be associated with young brands with a large Twitter following. Using an online survey, we find that many consumers are not able to identify sponsored content without disclosure.* Our findings highlight a potential need for further regulatory scrutiny and suggest that researchers studying influencers must account for undisclosed sponsored content.
https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/mksc.2024.083...
Now, one could argue that Mr Beast has the means to properly disclose these issues.
Probably should use the original title in some form, which makes it clear its not a legal judgement
The original title is almost double the maximum length for HN titles, and it’s confusingly dry. “Children's Advertising Review Unit” does sound like it could be a government entity. I do agree the current title could be slightly misleading, but hopefully there is a middle ground. I don’t have a suggestion offhand, but if you do, HN moderators do tend to take user suggestions into account in these cases.
Is this news? He's been running unlicensed lotteries on his youtube for almost a decade now.
I have a potentially silly question. Let's say I'm a jerk and I improperly collect children's data.
Is this data valuable to me in some way?
Luckily my children have all avoided these specific scammers, Mr Beast, Logan Paul, etc. But I keep my eye on the space a bit and I am appalled at how common and easy it is for these grifters to scam children.
Almost all of the content I have seen become popular have been highly toxic "relationships" with their audience. It's happening and pretty bad for non-children content, but it's happening worse and shouldn't be happening at all for childrens content.
I mean, we get it, they are a high-margin audience traditionally. Selling garbage to kids makes big bucks. Kids are dumb and they buy stupid things for non-existent reasons. That's why traditionally we have had more laws to protect them and been more vigilant about it. It seems like we've seriously slipped and just kind of thrown our hands in the air and concluded "I guess kids have to get scammed over and over"
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=N3zU7sV4bJE&pp=ygUZY29wcGEgZml...
Why is the title of the post here on HN so substantially different from the actual press release? The HN post tries to make it personal, claiming an individual is doing it, while the press release (correctly) refers to the companies. That seems an impotent distinction that the HN headline carefully erases.
You can email the mods to let them know, they are pretty responsive
Shut it down!
There’s going to be a big controversy about him one day and his evil will be shown, mark my words.
He has a controversy section in his wikipedia page with seven entries in it, and I assume that's leaving out smaller ones.
Evil is a very strong word.
Yes, it's why I chose it.
It’s not that strong. Evil isn’t just genocide. It would be evil of me to go around leaving trays full of beer outside just to drown slugs in them. It would be evil of me to shove razors into candy apples and hand them out at Halloween.
Not all evil has to be some grand world-level conspiracy and it can still be evil.
Apples on Halloween are evil enough without the razor blades
Apples on Halloween are evil enough without the razor blades
Not as evil and Mary Janes. Or five pennies tied up in string.
I hate this wording. Failure implies that he tried to, while he didn't even think about it
I disagree, the findings clearly show it as active malice rather than naive incompetence. From their findings, the company clearly did think about this stuff and tried to tick boxes while actively going around the rules.
> In MrBeast’s 2024 Halloween sweepstakes, Feastables encouraged participants to submit up to 24 entries daily until October 30 for a chance to win $10,000, with a grand prize of $1,000,000 on Halloween Day. The ad copy stated, “$10,000 USD Daily Winner. Enter with Purchase Through October 30.” In very small print was the disclaimer, “No purchase necessary, Click below for details.” The official rules stated that participants must be at least 13 years old with parental permission and entrants under 13 are not allowed.
That shows they clearly were aware of the fact they must have a "no purchase necessary" option, because they added it into the small print. They then actively pushed the "with purchase" line everywhere else.
They knew what they should be doing and then did everything they could to do otherwise to sell more product.
I agree with your disagreement. It was more of "he didn't even think about following the rules"
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is there a name for the phenomenon where you get so tired of seeing someones face pop up over and over and over that you start to hate the person and despite their good deeds feel no remorse for them when they end up in trouble?
I think in MrBeast's case it goes beyond just overexposure to seeming like a sketchy guy because of how hard he tries to project the image of being a good person while simultaneously flaunting his wealth.
It's very reminiscent of many crypto-scammers, who flaunted their wealth and talked about wanting to help others become wealthy too, only to eventually rug pull.
I don't think he's flaunting wealth per se. He doesn't claim to be wealthy. If anything he claims the opposite, always talking about how he immediately reinvests everything and keeps barely anything for himself or as a reserve.
But he is definetly flaunting something. I'd maybe label it as flaunting generosity, or the ability to change people's lifes
He's been involved with enough actual crypto scammers that it's probably more than a superficial similarity.
He is heavily involved with both Logan Paul and KSI. And while those two haven't built their career around crypto scams the label "crypto scammer" has been used for both of them
Also Gary Vee, and directly contributing to a number of pump and dump scams.
What good deeds?
Isn’t this the guy that gives out cars to one random person on YouTube while their friends get nothing then films the reactions for megabucks?
I don't know much about him, but he does lots of stuff about bringing water to places in Africa and curing blindness or deafness as well from what I've seen. Not sure of the ratio of what to what.
This is not how you judge character. Character is what you do when you have nothing to gain or even something to lose. These are merely performances for YouTube videos that help his brand and generate millions of views. Adults at least should be aware of this, because this is how you get scammed.
OP never used the word "character." They asked about good deeds, which appears to be about the action, whereas character is about the intention of the person. If MrBeast cured your blindness and he did it solely to make money and doesn't care about you at all, you still got your blindness cured. If I volunteer at the soup kitchen just to meet women, I have failing character but I still did the good deed. This is the MrBeast dilemma: what are we to conclude when the two are in opposition? What does it mean when someone does a good deed in order to benefit from it themselves? Is that a win-win situation, or is it bad? Does it completely negate the good deed? These are generally unsettled questions in our culture.
Based on the context they were obviously judging their character based off their "good deeds". You are just circling around the obvious. As for this "dilemma", he has already shown he will exploit children.
This tells you who he is and what his incentives are. If you would like to believe otherwise go for it. My advice simply is to watch out in real life for people you think are good if this is how you judge people.
His philantrophy videos underperform compared to his other videos, typically getting 10-30% fewer views than the worst performing video right before or after.
Maybe you could argue that they aren't financially lucrative but at least help his brand. But he seems to get a lot of hate for making those videos. I suspect his brand would be much better if he stuck to making highly produced challenge and contest style videos
Now there are three worlds we could live in: In the first I am misjudging his videos and they are actually good for his brand or finances. That's the one you suspect. In the second they are bad for his brand but he perceives them as helping him. Quite possible, even if he seems to have reasonably good self reflection. In the third they are bad for his brand and finances but he wouldn't be able to finance projects of this scopes without the videos and sponsorships. That's what MrBeast claims to be true
I don't know which of those is true, all three of them seem likely to me
>His philantrophy videos underperform compared to his other videos, typically getting 10-30% fewer views than the worst performing video right before or after.
Doesn't matter. We are literally having this discussion because of the very fact that he has chosen to make these videos. This tells you how effective it is for his brand. More than likely it is a net-positive even if he does get criticism.
We wouldn't be in our current political situation if adults were aware of this. The average person is well below what we usually assume the average is.
Ok so David Attenborough is no good then?
Whatever he does is for show first and foremost and only. Whatever benefits other people gain in the process is always less than what he will gain from the views. It's very much not a charity although he sells it like one.
Is there no such thing as a win-win situation?
I'm sorry for the previous rambling. The word I was looking for is Exploitation. That's what it is. Making a show about poor people while it gets you rich as F. It's just wrong.
There is a way to give money and stuff away for good causes and it's not to put up a show, then pack up and never return to see check that what you did actually helped. What he's doing is a lottery, making poor people win to capture their immediate sentiments. It's totally artificial and done for the wrong reasons which can have a number of negative outcomes that you'll never hear about because it's a closed process. Would you consider lotto a charity?
This was his older content. Ever since his squid game video his videos are larger-than-life with elaborate sets, flying to crazy destinations, etc. The simple giving cars away, or giving a house to a pizza delivery guy, or reading the bee moving script is long over.
One point about giving away cars - it’s not always to someone else’s detriment. He once gave someone ~30 used cars and they had to give them all away (to friends, family, randoms) within 24hours to earn a Tesla for himself.
In a weird way he is turning into the squid game villain himself. He stole their look for his henchmen and also takes on the persona. Almost every video he has made since would fit right in that world.
That and a mix of Willy Wonka.
The reeks of someone who has watched clout-chasing rage bait videos on Mr. Beast, but never actually watched Mr. Beast.
I'm confused. Is your problem the giving away of cars, or that the receiver's friends don't also get cars?
That's just your intuition telling you the person you are seeing doing "good deeds" is actually shady and a fraud.
People tend to have a good intuition for these kind of things. Every time my alarm bells have gone off it turned out they were in fact wearing a mask.
This is not an era for long-term effort. This is about moving very fast breaking things and growing as fast as possible , so that when it all goes bust you can still leave with a cushy fortune. This culture is everywhere now, from arts to business
Social media algorithm overload
thank you
<Blank> Degrangement Syndrome, I think MrBeast has definitely reached that status by the rabid amount of hate he gets whenever brought up here or on reddit.
Is it similar to being tired of people suggesting that influencers who abuse the poverty porn trope have somehow done a good thing?
I'm not saying he doesn't deserve the feedback he's receiving right now. Just saying whatever you want to call this phenomena, its what i'm experiencing. He would have been a lot more likeable if he wasn't so aggressive in self promotion but I've heard him boast about it on podcasts and I think he knows what he was doing
On a related note, I'm terrified of typing his name into search or watching any of his videos because once yt thinks I'm interested in the "topic" I'll never be able to get rid of his face from my recommended videos or news suggestions. I have his channel blocked but I suspect that if you watch a blocked channel voluntarily they will treat it as an unblock.
I've been overly aggressive blocking channels on youtube whenever i click on shit like that by accident and my recommendations are mostly safe.
The problem is the copycat and adjacent channels. You watch and block $BOZO, you now get suggestions for $BOZO reacts, $BOZO extras, $BOZO clips, and all of $BOZO's competitor channels.
Yeah, youtube recommendations get into the shit rabbit role much faster than any other platform.
Just go into watch history and delete the video. Or pause watch history before playing
Overexposure. Desensitization. Regardless, someone doing something good doesn't excuse them when they do something bad. You can be a civil rights icon who improved the lives of millions of people, but when you stand around, watch, and give advice as your buddy rapes a woman, you are a piece of shit.
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When it comes to people that wealthy, the money they're using for their "good deeds" are the bare minimum they think they need to get you off their case. So when you say "I don't think someone should be a billionaire, that means something has gone seriously wrong" they can point to how he filmed himself giving a homeless guy a house.
In the case of MrBeast it's not even really reputation laundering, he's just an algorithm goblin who iterated through different shticks until landing on giveaways and contests as the things which consistently brought in the most clicks. I don't think he was even that rich when he started doing them, as far as I can tell his first ever prize was just two $50 iTunes gift cards while still recording in his bedroom, and after that it wasn't long until nearly all of his content revolved around giveaways.
The whole operation is optimized to the gills for maximum engagement above all else, down to A/B testing a hundred different thumbnail variants for every video: https://x.com/Creator_Toolbox/status/1783995589543227402
> down to A/B testing a hundred different thumbnail variants for every video
To be fair, this is apparently table stakes for being a YouTuber at the moment. Maybe not hundreds but definitely several. Veritasium did a video [0] about how he has to do this to maintain enough viewership to keep YouTubing viable as a full-time job.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2xHZPH5Sng
It makes sense though. Or to put it another way, it seems odd to expect that there's always a global thumbnail optimum for a given YouTube video.
So to bring in the most views, put out different thumbnails to attract different viewers. Ideally YouTube would have support for this where you can just upload a dozen thumbnails or so, and YouTube figure out who needs to see which.
Eh, Veritasium is now majority owned by PE now (Electrify). This is why they’ve been introducing new hosts and Derek is doing more intros / voiceovers - the end goal removing reliance on the original channel owner.
So does he need to do it to remain profitable or does PE need to do it to pay for all their overhead / etc?
Ah interesting, didn't know that. The video is at least 4 years old, so suppose it depends on when Derek sold. Anecdotally, I think all the new hosts came after that thumbnail video, but I couldn't say how closely the changes you mention followed.
In general, it seems this is a thing that YouTubers feel they need to do to avoid being swallowed, but the extent to which MrBeast does it could well be extreme, and thereby worthy of suspicion.
It’s not that difficult to become a billionaire. If you can collect $1 dollar from a billion people, you’ll be a billionaire. If you increase that to $10, you only need 100 million people, roughly a third of the United States.
What you need is some kind of platform on which you could collect those dollars. In recent history the internet has become a powerful platform and that is why we have so many more billionaires.
But what has not changed is our sensitivity to good deeds. If you’re a billionaire, giving all your wealth away is not really going to be appreciated much more than doing some highly visible good deeds that give smaller amounts of wealth away. So why do it? There is diminishing returns for good deeds. You’re better off staying a billionaire until you die, after which your wealth will be distributed anyway.
Getting $1 from a single person is already a challenge. Automating that is incredibly hard and clearly not something you can do alone, and if you don't do it alone then everybody gets a cut, including your bank, IRS, etc.
If you're a billionaire, you don't feel the need to win the unaffected public's affections. You just do good because you have the resources to do it and can derive satisfaction from the people who are benefiting. You don't get to being ruthless enough to become a billionaire if you're dependent on what uninvolved strangers think of you. If you were, you'd be giving it all away well before piling up enough to become a billionaire.
Tbh i don't see a problem with this take other than people don't like it.
People just vastly overestimate the power of money at scale. There is more power and inspiration in doing highly visible good deeds that people will see and feel good about than just cutting checks to large groups of people. It takes a billionaire to truly understand this.
> If you’re a billionaire, giving all your wealth away is not really going to be appreciated much more than doing some highly visible good deeds that give smaller amounts of wealth away. So why do it?
You could do it for the intrinsic satisfaction of being a decent human and creating a better world. Could probably end or avoid a few wars, too. You’d certainly go into the annals of history is you eradicated poverty in whole areas of the world (which you could easily do, as a billionaire).
> It’s not that difficult to become a billionaire.
Please show us. Then give all your money away and see how that worked out. Don’t knock it until you try it. If you later regret it, that’s OK, shouldn’t be that difficult to become a billionaire again.
The idea that giving all your money away makes you a decent human and or it would create a better world is just flawed logic.
The goodness isn’t in giving all the money away, but in the positive change you can induce while making even a fraction of it available to a worthy cause. Obviously you wouldn’t create a better world by giving your money away to another billionaire or Polluting Genociders Inc, but if you engage in good faith and steel man the argument you can surely find some examples you’d agree with, such as preventing wars for resources and saving people from painful slow deaths due to starvation. Can we agree those are positive things? That working towards improving the lives of others without expecting a return makes one a better person?
Consider this: A billionaire (not even a multibillionaire, just one on the “lower end”) who gave away $1 a second would be giving away $86400 a day. Sounds like a lot, until you realise it would still take them 32 years to give it all away, and that’s assuming they wouldn’t be making any money in the meantime.
Now consider the number of people living in extreme poverty.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_poverty
and this is downvoted why? giving all your money away in no way makes you a decent human or guarantees a better world. It's flawed logic. A platitude.
Please stray from the meta "why am I downvoted!". It's low-effort, reddit-esque commentary that only serves yourself. You can edit your other comment.
You're being downvoted because you're not responding to the comment in earnest. The comment says,
"You could do it for the intrinsic satisfaction of being a decent human and creating a better world."
Obviously, that implies good intention. Your contrarian take sidesteps this for no real reason: you present no argument other than being contrarian for contrarian-sake. Maybe try explaning why you think the logic is flawed.
Frankly I disagree and am pointing out the obvious subtext.
if giving all my money away leads to "the intrinsic satisfaction of being a decent human and creating a better world."
Then it's not much of a step or even a leap to go the other way with it. If I horde all my money or even don't give it all away, then I will be denied that intrinsic satisfaction because I'm not a decent human or creating a better world.
Do you think we're extrapolating too much into the meaning of "decent human"?
His logic is not flawed to anyone who thinks about it:
1. You have to be a shitty human being to become a billionaire. 2. If you give away all your money, you’re not a shitty human being. 3. But if you’re not a shitty human being, how could you have become a billionaire in the first place?
???
There is no way to win with these people.
Can you quote this thread where somebody said any of that? If you can't, can you explain how you came to those conclusions? And finally, what are you trying to "win," and why? lol
You're arguing against points no one made. No one in this immediate thread, at least. No one here said you have to be shitty to be a billionaire, or that giving money away stops you from being shitty.
Please don’t straw man. Engage with the arguments in earnest, with what the person said, not what you imagine they said.
> You could do it for the intrinsic satisfaction of being a decent human and creating a better world.
Do you think we're extrapolating too much into the meaning of "decent human"?
Say you asked “what’s the point of running? Why should I do it every day? I’ll only get tired” and I answer “you could do it for the intrinsic satisfaction of pushing yourself, out of love for the sport, to be healthier, to become an athlete”. Do you understand that to mean “anyone who doesn’t run every day is unhealthy, not an athlete, and doesn‘t love sports”? Hopefully not, that would be ridiculous. All that’s needed is to point at a swimmer or a cyclist as a counter example.
So yes, you are extrapolating too much. Saying “doing this is good or decent” does not automatically mean “not doing this is bad or indecent”. You are not reading some “obvious subtext” (as you put it in another comment), you’re making up beliefs and ascribing negative intentions to complete strangers.
LOL. Just wait until you see TikTok, SnapChat, Facebook, Apple, Google, etc.
This is whataboutism. Just because they are also doing it doesn't mean its okay to do at all. It just means that Mr. Beast is the one being focused on here, and that other organizations will have to wait their turn.
I like to call it "Selective Enforcement"
I guess its good that this is drawing some light on the subject, but nothing will happen.
Even if MrBeast were to be investigated by a government agency for similar issues, his business links to noted Trump sycophant Chamath Palihapitiya would shield him from any consequences for his actions.
It’s funny how he’s admired by Chamath and other Silicon Valley types for his entrepreneurship or good deeds or whatever when the core of how his channel works is deceiving viewers
https://youtu.be/k5xf40KrK3I
Yeah people can barely see past the length of their own nose.
Its a marketing experiment basically. I think a bunch of people coalesced to answer the question. "So, how could we completely wipe the leaderboard in terms of views/attention and dethrone an entire cohort of competitors in the quest for dominance over people's attention?"
In the process they completely pulled out all stops, if it bleeds it leads, save the children, high risk stunts, and psychological knee jerks. Out of nowhere they play minecraft too? Of course, its popular so, why not. The ends justifies the means. Of course, all influencers do this to a point, but none are so systematic, diversified and approach the question with so many types of content.
No surprise there. Good thing some officials try and do something about it.
Not officials. BBB is essentially Angie’s list.
I think it's more accurate to say that The Better Business Bureau is Yelp from the 1910s.
That's strange to me that you'd compare something that's been around longer to the thing that's more recent in this way
The point is that despite their deliberately confusing decision to have the word "Bureau" in their name, they have absolutely nothing to do with the government or anything official. They are as official as JD Power, Consumer Reports or Yelp. I wonder how many millions of people continue to be fooled by their deceptive name?
Federal Express is not part of the federal anything, yet nobody is confused by that.
I'm sure people are confused by that.
People get confused that the Chamber of Commerce isn't a government body.
even more so as in some countries and industries membership is mandatory.
but also, delegating certain responsibilities to non-govenment bodies does happen too. these then have quasi governmental authority.
this made me laugh
[flagged]
So if you donate money to charity then you get a pass on obeying the law and general morals? Is this like indulgences from the Pope? How much does a murder cost?
Well, yes, actually. That does seem to be the way of the world. Look how many 1%ers only make donations based on PR recommendations to keep their image in good standing. Funny you made a Pope joke, but it is common for people attending the Church to pay donations for absolution. As for your murder cost question, I guess that depends on which ad in the back of Soldier of Fortune you replied.
> but it is common for people attending the Church to pay donations for absolution
This is not at all common and hasn't been for a few hundred years.
(That said, your point about wealthy people making big donations as a PR move is definitely as prevalent as it ever was)
If I go out and randomly punch someone in the face but buy a homeless person dinner, hey, I did something good, but maybe I still shouldn't have done the former.
Yea but he’s not exactly going around randomly punching people in the face is he? Lot of moral grandstanding in this thread.
He’s a human being and he’s not perfect but some of these comments calling him a psychopath or sycophant are going way too far. My psychoanalysis of everyone psychoanalyzing Mr Beast would be to turn the screen off and get some fresh air
Actions have a statistical inevitability to them. I don't think it's much different than going out and randomly punching people in the face.
When you have a lot of money and influence, and you have a choice between two policies: policy A which will statistically harm 1,000 people, and policy B which will statistically harm 1,500 people, it is no different, to me, than going around randomly punching 500 people you never had to.
For some reason people give these choices a pass. I don't.
I might give Mr. Beast a bit of a pass because there might be some ignorance involved. But for most people making these decisions, that live within large corporations, I don't, because they know better, they just don't care.
> Yea but he’s not exactly going around randomly punching people in the face is he?
I mean, not directly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MrBeast
"In September 2024, Donaldson was one of the subjects of a class action lawsuit that alleged widespread mistreatment, sexual harassment, and unpaid expenses and wages on his ongoing reality television series."
He gained money for those good things through fraud
https://youtu.be/k5xf40KrK3I
In a Mister Burns sorta way, I guess
That giant disc to block out the sun to increase power consumption was pretty genius though
Falling for PR and advertising is a moral failing by which you are not even bothering to consider the reality of the situation.
That is just effective altruism by another name.
Not really, no. There is extensive documentation showing his charity is way less than it appears to be, and selling overpriced unhealthy garbage to children negates what little goodwill he may have gained through it, in my book.
So?
No. He has no compassion nor authenticity for what he does.
He's been doing it to paint an image to mask what's goes on behind the screen. He's a narcissistic psychopathic arsehole.
Don't you know his mission is not to disclose ads or properly collect children's data, but to make the best YOUTUBE videos?