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Comment by mdrzn | Hacker News Reader

"It’s terrifying that a man spent one hundred days in a small circle in an empty field. It’s even more terrifying that this is solely at the whims of a single former Minecraft YouTube creator who happened to find the perfect niche to build a platform and happens to have a perfect sense for what his millions of anonymous viewers want from a video."

Cannot agree less on this take. There's dozen of interviews with Jimmy (Mr. Beast himself) where he explains his POV, why he does what he does, and what his goal is: make the best YT videos possible.

Nobody is forced to partecipate in his videos.

Maybe this difference in opinion in based on age? Or some other metric?

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Some people fundamentally have an issue with the idea of making money off of what essentially amounts to embarrassment or (depending on the challenge) light mental torture.

Mr. Beast's motives are irrelevant if that's the belief you're operating under.

In that case singling out Mr. Beast makes no sense, there's reality TV shows which are much more extreme in embarrassment and torture than any Mr. Beast video.

Part of the article is about the intersection of embarrassment for money and algorithmic content recommendations. Mr. Beast is an example that embodies both of these trends, whereas reality TV is necessarily less "online" than a social media influencer. In a lot of ways, online content is an intensification of the trend that reality shows like "Fear Factor" started.

It's also a short article. Bringing in other examples would necessarily lengthen the piece and potentially distract from the major points of the piece.

Those views seem inconsistent unless those people also disagree with compensated labor.

There’s already a type of degradation in a conventional job: someone having power over you that you can’t question, you have to degrade yourself by being agreeable to nonsense, you have to whore out your time and attention and energy, etc.

Spending 100 days in isolation is less degrading to me than all the things people take for granted at even their cushy software job, they’re just used to it.

How many of you are forced to sit in on absolutely banal Zoom meetings yet grandstanding about what someone else wants to do for $500k?

There's a spectrum of embarrassment/torture between "100 days in a circle" and "sitting in boring Zoom meetings," wouldn't you agree?

A person that has no problem with paid labor but does have an issue with 100 days in a circle could have a consistent view if they believe that the former doesn't rise to the level of "torture" or "embarrassment."

Looking at the comments of the people who hate MrBeast, I suspect a large amount of them do disagree with compensated labour. It's like MrBeast has become an avatar for capitalism in people's minds.

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