Ignoring the ethics of Mr Beast, he is producing real videos at an incredibly high volume and they consistently do numbers.
None of those videos is easy to make.
Sure, it's maybe not great to be so impressed by logistics or supply chain of a tobacco company, but from a business and systems view some of it is interesting
"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.
I don't expect to get a reply given how popular this article and discussion was and given how late I am but ...
What are the ethical considerations here?
The opening reply that kickstarted this particular thread was:
> You could say that about literally any shady business
But that user never bothered to qualify what exactly they consider to be "shady" about Mr. Beast's business.
Other than the fact that he has a hugely successful YouTube channel, I know next to nothing about him. I don't watch his content. From what I gather it is mass appeal entertainment.
I've read in some of the replies that he does philanthropic content and there are some un-cited claims that he "pockets" donations (that would be shady if true, but again - those claims were void of any links that would give them credibility).
Others seem to package-deal him in with all of YouTube creators, and they will cite shitty things that other content creators have done for clout as if Mr. Beast himself (or his company) did those things.
Most of the postings here seem to hate him for being successful at creating YouTube content that they personally don't like.
If you want to convince me that a YouTube channel is unethical, then point me towards the victims. Show me who he is hurting and make a clear case for how he is directly responsible for hurting them.
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)
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.
Yes, the context matters a lot. One of the frustrations with this conversation (and this is a thing that happens sometimes and doesn't other times - I don't mean to say this is always a problem on hn) is that we aren't able to discuss the thing because we have to spend the right number of tokens acknowledging globally recognized facts.
I want there to be one comment at the top level saying: hey just in case you're not aware, here's context that you need to know when evaluating a document by Foo.
And then I want the rest of us to be able to discuss it with the understanding that we all have that context.
I agree, but I also think that sometimes looking at the data we have holistically is a good idea.
as the most extreme example; we paid too high a blood cost that shall hpefully never be repeated in civilization again with the Holocaust. But some of the findings in those experiments to have value (I know many of the experiments and findings are worthless from a medical sense). I don't blame anyone at all that takes a moral stance to burn such data in order to discourage any backroom experiments from trying to repeat this, but some of that knowledge was used to save lives.
>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.
I believe it can. a lot of the advice I read here is just good business sense.
>Your goal here is to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible. That’s the number one goal of this production company. It’s not to make the best produced videos. Not to make the funniest videos. Not to make the best looking videos. Not the highest quality videos.. It’s to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible.
This sucks to hear as an enthusiast focused on research, but this is honestly just talking about scoping and focusing your goal. very common business sense. But your goal hopefully isn't to shovel out slop with clickbait thumbnails that maximizes engagement.
> This is what dictates what we do for videos... If a viewer feels their expectations are not being matched, they’ll click away - driving down the crucial Average View Duration that informs how much the video is promoted by YouTube’s all-important mystical algorithms.
This is about making an engaging hook. Again, good business sense you'll hear launching any product.
This is definitely for clickbait (and the interpretation here focusing on AVD over quality can be scrutinized), but you can balance this and make a good hook without outright lying.
>An example of the “wow factor” would be our 100 days in the circle video.... we bring it in on a crane 30 seconds into the video. Why? Because who the fuck else on Youtube can do that lol.
crude language, but they understand the competition, and what they can and can't do. Ideally the lesson you get here isn't to just "outspend your competition", but that you need to understand your strengths and highlight them. Mr. Beast mindhacked the algorithms early on and uses those funds to do stuff others don't have the Net Worth to even attempt.
etc. It's possible, as long as you keep a moral compass in mind while understanding the undertones of the advise.
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.
1. morals drive ethics, so no point separating the two.
2. ethics is not some ettiquite decided in a business room. they are formed by society. It was probably never ethical to let kids work in coal mines, but as long as it wasn't illegal (and can take the PR hit) some businesses would just do it.
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.
This is apparently an unpopular idea but you're right: human nature is based on cooperation. Even under "free market" systems people do things that are not optimal market decisions because they are naturally predisposed to helping other people, even when it is often exploited. A lot of marketing deliberately exploits this, e.g. the common tactic of "giving something for free" to make the consumer feel like they owe a favor, or giving products a cutesy persona so consumers anthropomorphize the product and their interactions with it instead of seeing it as a disposable tool.
We come into this world naked, defenseless, starving and freezing. Other animals are able to defend themselves or at least flee, often only minutes after being born or hatching. It takes literal months for us to learn to meaningfully move on our own, about a year to feed ourselves and many more years to be able to pose a meaningful threat to natural predators or forage for food on our own. Throughout this entire time we not only need to be nurtured by our parents, we need an entire society to sustain us and our caregivers.
This is a common misunderstanding of our evolution: it's not simply our brains that gave us an edge over the rest of the animal kingdom, it's our cooperation. Large brains are a natural consequence of complex social interactions and feed back into them. It's not just the ability to make and use tools that set us apart, it's our ability to teach each other about them and learn from each other.
It didn't take a great individual inventor, it took a tribe full of people to carry on each invention and pass the knowledge to the next generation while sustaining the tribe to allow the inventors to invent new technology or improve upon old ones for the benefit of the entire tribe. We're not standing on the shoulders of giants, we're standing on a human pyramid of all who came before us and everyone around us helping to perpetuate humanity.
Please indulge my hypothetical situation: there is a company that produces many very expensive videos every week and make a lot of money from each one.
Every single video they make is a hit.
In this hypothetical situation, I would be impressed that this organization is able to deliver such consistent product. I would be curious about what they do or say operationally that enables that.
At the end of the podcast the filmcast, they say "at the end of the day, it is really impressive that _ made a movie." (They name the director)
This is true if the director has made dozens of movies or one. It's always impressive. Doing things in the real world is hard.
Do you find anything in this hypothetical situation agreeable? Or is it only hard when someone you like does it?
Ethics only exist to provide value. If you can’t point to a value that your ethics provide then it’s not needed and excessive. Most of the ethical standards do provide value or mitigate risk you just need to understand what that risk and value trades is.
This is the line of reasoning phone scammers used whenever kitboga (a scam baiter) revealed his identity and asked them why they did this job instead of something better. One of them asked him "oh, so you are a saint, and you never did anything wrong?"
It's absurd to attempt to equate two actions completely out of their context to claim that "everyone is unethical sometimes ".
Ethics is no binary. You ethics are not mine and everybody does questionable actions from time to time. A company is an entity with potentially thousands people, one of them doing questionable things will happen.
Some legal entities are acting all the time in a way we would lock them up in psych ward if they were a natural person. That might be a good way to "succeed" but that's probably something the society shouldn't promote/foster.
In the real world it's not only revenue and profits. That's for sure taking most of the space but people behind the entities are caring about other stuff and takes non-profit-optimal decisions all the time.
Sbf is just an example of people who failed. Contrary, Musk or Sackler family are good examples of people who succeeded. Do you want to talk about their questionable ethics and how it made them extremely rich?
Games Workshop, multi-billion pound publicly traded British company. Manufacture their core goods in British factories, don’t engage in tax shenanigans.
I am from far enough back in time (started with 1st edition and then went to 2nd - and had almost all of the codexes, even though I only played a single faction/army) I would buy codexes (army books) for all the armies, because I liked the art and the lore.
The 2nd edition box set was about ~£35 in 1993, adjusted for inflation that would be ~£73 now - which then when converted into CAD is well...alot more than what I just paid for 10th edition (about $80 CAD+tax). So - it's a good deal - and I am sure that there is overlap amongst friends during edition changeover.
5-year cycle would be a happy medium, but "that's just like my opinion man"...
> There is no ethics in business, only revenue and profits.
Ethics affect everything we do. If you are doing something deeply unethical, you have way more difficult time finding good employees, for example. Because people don't want to work for scumbags. And the people you find, are likely also unethical and care only about money, how do you think that is going to play out in the long run?
Business and ethics are inseparable. You have to understand ethics to be able to make money - not meaning that you need to be ethical.
I guess people are taking this comment as supporting unethical business, but in fact what he's saying applies to capitalism in general, and why capitalism is unethical. Pretty much every big company did and is doing unethical things, but for most people it doesn't matter because they're "successful". If you equate amounts of money with success, as our system does, then it is pretty much guaranteed that people will do unethical things to reach "success", i.e., X amounts of dollars.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
Maybe the misalignment is one of misunderstanding - we don’t make it explicit that sharing something like this isn’t to celebrate it.
I don’t catch any major celebrations of abusive tactics on HN, but then again I tend to be late to the comments and those posts are buried by the time I arrive.
Let me ask that question a different way: let’s say what you learn had no value or it was something that was already pretty well understood (such as the fact that people click misleading or hyperbolic links). What was the value to society in that information being created or shared?
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
There are probably business ethics in the cartels as well. They have different core values and risk profiles than conventional businesses but there are likely business operating guidelines and operational ground rules that we can ethics.
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.
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.
>- 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.
- 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).
None of those videos is easy to make.
Sure, it's maybe not great to be so impressed by logistics or supply chain of a tobacco company, but from a business and systems view some of it is interesting