In the belly of the MrBeast
kevinmunger.substack.com
kevinmunger.substack.com
> “Communication within the YouTube Apparatus has no meaning.” The rapid feedback loop between creators and audiences (as constructed by platform metrics) means that the system more and more responds to itself. Rather than trying to go somewhere (as is the case with political ideology), the creator seeks simply intensification, to draw more and more of the world into his whirlpool of content.
This idea – that meaning is replaced by intensification – helps me understand a lot about the world today.
I think the idea that media aimed at education or sharing a passionate hobby is different from media that exists in the first place to just make money. If you start out with a goal that involves communication, I think it's more likely to stick than if your goal was just to become the Death Star from the start!
Just like it's easy for people into video games to think the latest Steam-chart topping indie hit is really popular.
And then you look up the numbers and it turns out something like FIFA (EAFC) makes more money than every single indie game on Steam combined.
Leaf through the BoingBoing BBS sometime to get a sense for it.
No sir, people of all tribes are fully capable of getting swept into rage machines. At the end of the day we are animals operating on animal instinct. No tribe gets to claim otherwise.
The right is stupid or craven or greedy or just evil, but true righteous fury is reserved for those who saw a woman's rights not getting respected one time.
I find the left goes into anger machines and ends up suggesting overzealous steps for necessary changes that take many people aback.
But that’s not new. What’s not new is that now we have social media and mainstream media that wants to fan the flames by giving voices to the most extreme.
- Fairness Doctrine killed in the 80s, resulting rise of partisan AM radio and, somewhat later, Fox News.
- Media ownership concentration rules neutered in early ‘00s (iirc). More centralization, again in the hands of big capital.
- None of those rules ever applied to the Web, so when its power as a propaganda and agitation tool skyrocketed with increased use by normal folks (rise of Facebook; usable smartphones with the iPhone) that immediately headed bad directions.
Now we have LLMs, which are at their most-useful by far when you don’t care about accuracy or reputation—so, scams and propaganda getting a big boost in productivity.
He did nothing because he had no interest in doing anything to limit corporate influence or power. They put him in power, after all.
The question becomes, is YouTube's algorithm good enough to itself pick up on this new market and serve it? I see no reason it couldn't. It's possible human algorithm-minders might sabotage this instinct by going 'no, this is the big win' and coaxing it towards MrBeast stuff, but surely the algorithm will eventually win out?
Something I find interesting is that there are good channels producing very high quality (non-extreme or non-intense) content for many interests on YouTube and they coexist with the hyperbolic large channels. I suppose that they make less money, but they do so without a large production crew. I think the algorithm is supporting both types of content (content for myriad mindless viewers, and content for the fewer discerning viewers) and accommodates both scales.
See definition 2 here:
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/literal...
Use of literally in, well, the non-literal sense dates back hundreds of years.
Not to mention, if you're using the word "literally" to mean "something that actually happened", you are also using the word wrong. Because it means "relating to or expressed in letters".
I also notice people complain about "literally", but they never complain about "really" which also gets used in the same ways even though it means the opposite.
And I've noticed people do it as a substitute for intelligence. They complain about these things to seem intelligent. To seem knowledgeable. But when confronted with knowledge that contradicts the complaint, they try to dismiss the knowledge rather than adjust their point of view. Similar with fewer/less. These words mean the same thing. There are no rules as to when to use one or the other. There was the preference of one guy, who even said that he had no reason for it, he just liked it. And people took that as an ironclad rule. Or the gif debate. People try to invent all of these rules, but get pissy when you point out all the places where English does not follow those rules.
I feel personally this is a big reason why communication across the internet is becoming much more intense and full of conflict.
Perhaps language is fundamentally metaphorical, and perhaps reality is actually abstract.
There's something to be said about the structuralist part of it: using large amounts of text as a rule set to return a semblance of truth seems to be a structuralist's wet dream.
It's like drawing the map for the king: the real is being represented by reducing a huge number of data points to a mixture of randomness and hard rules that pretend to be real.
At the very least it's a form of hyperreality as far as I understand it.
Fundamentally it's about language. What does a word or a sentence represent? How do you go from a spoken or written text to something that is meaningful to you if it's presented to you?
This intermediating process of communication is highly complicated and fraught with misconceptions which lead to lots of fuzzy logic being applied by your brain when trying to understand something.
The stuff that's happening between hearing or reading something and you actually taking it in as something meaningful is a vast space which is as of yet unexplored and gives a lot of room for speculation. This is what Beaudrillard (and others) tried to describe and analyze.
And it has nothing to do with math. Math is a whole other story and won't solve the problem for you because it's a different kind of medium (or text if you will). Math sits between you and the other while language is something in yourself, so to speak.
LLM's try to gather meaning from text stochastically. This is not the way we gather meaning as humans and in a sense this is not how communication works in the real.
But Beaudrillard (and others) reasoned that we left the real and live in hyperreality. The most famous example of his is Disney World: As soon as it existed it started to infuse itself into our everyday lives. The simulation of a fantasy world (the real existing Disney World theme park) has started to become real outside of it but not rooted in reality (it became a simulacrum): it is an emulation of reality. In that sense it is virtual. It's like virtual reality in the real world, it's a fantasy you can touch (and that can be sold and be molded to be sold more successfully).
The idea of sociability in social media is another example: it does not exist in the real sense, it is mediated by technology. Its origins are hinted at by using terminology of social interactions but in the end it's a transactional empty sort of sociability which promotes attention seeking and fast, easily digested pieces of symbolism over actual interactions. And more and more this kind of "new" sociability becomes part of our actual social lives.
Though now that I think of it, didn't that only happen when their power was on the way out, replaced by trucks and container ships ?
When researching+writing this, did you find it useful to look through McLuhan's "Medium is the Message" lens? If so, what are the "message" implications of this ouroboric/circular/whirlpool medium?
In fairness, this is how the world has always been.
In the US for instance, back when there were only 3 networks and a channel for public tv, people were "reactionary, with only a superficial understanding of issues".
"He repeatedly states that the eighteenth century, the "Age of Reason", was the pinnacle for rational argument. Only in the printed word, he states, could complicated truths be rationally conveyed. Postman gives a striking example: many of the first fifteen U.S. presidents could probably have walked down the street without being recognized by the average citizen, yet all these men would have been quickly known by their written words. However, the reverse is true today. The names of presidents or even famous preachers, lawyers, and scientists call up visual images, typically television images, but few, if any, of their words come to mind. The few that do almost exclusively consist of carefully chosen soundbites. Postman mentions Ronald Reagan, and comments upon Reagan's abilities as an entertainer."
It's very easy to realize you're "different" from other people, but can't place your finger on it, yet manage to make up for the differences in odd and creative ways!
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-seen-wearing-glasses_n_...
TV was also required to air a minimal amount of educational television for children under 16 during the day. I learn way more on days home sick (latchkey kid) than I'd learn at days in school.
Shouting "SO AND SO MAYBE MIGHT HAVE POSSIBLY DID THIS BAD THING BUT I DON'T HAVE ANY EVIDENCE!" from the rooftops won't provoke much action as shouting the same but reinforcing that it is definitely true, for sure, of course it is.
Then with human behaviour/intelligence there's the spectrum of people who care about fact-finding or not and will react according to new information depending on this. Some of it is general laziness, they can't be bothered fact finding, and some of it is tribal, they accept x must be true because it's about y tribe where they're a member of z tribe.
That's why it's so easy for politics, big tech, etc to manipulate people; because we're all still monkeys!
Some of us just can't work up the energy to answer a question, but if we see something wrong, it doesn't sit well with us, and we have to correct it.
And yes, sometimes when I see a question I can answer, it gives me the energy to answer it ... but not always ...
It's possible to make 80% of people mad, 20% of people happy, and benefit from the 20% while the 80% can't do anything to you.
To be fair, while shorts is clearly designed to generate high virality and compete w/ TikTok, YouTube does incentivize longer form content. For regular videos the platform appears to optimize for engagement at about the 10 minute mark.
Political/social discourse is complex and I believe goes beyond a simple soundbite problem. One could argue this began with 24 hour news cycles with all the time in the world, and news had to become entertainment to fill the space. The movie "Network" presaged this sensationalized this culture situation well before it became a thing, and certainly well before social media was conceptualized.
If they only gave you the option to remove shorts from results...
if your channel doesn't have dedicated enough fans to do that it's not gonna work on you. and you almost certainly aren't getting news coverage of your review of a star wars hotel, you know? Jenny is rare for that.
Contrapoints (eg the Twilight one), Big Joel's (recently made a 6hr one!), FoldingIdeas and so on. It's a very different model, and a number of these creators also make videos for Nebula.
It's a very different business model, and it doesn't have the potential to become as profitable as Mr Beast.
If you have 15k patreon subs those are guaranteed views around your video's publish time, which presumably is a good thing for their algorithmic weight.
On the "not even wrong" front, in the Pauli sense of the phrase: she's a relatively minor success, you'll find 20 police bodycam video accounts created in the last year that get 10x views.
There is a pattern with well-known creators that are more video-essay than intensifying whirlpoolers or whatever, where they keep YouTube productions to a handful of high-quality videos a year, and monetize via Patreon with less well-polished videos published much more frequently.
My guess is that if all you want to do is work the algorithm to get views then you’re going to get worked by the algorithm.
We need to slow down and to connect back to nature
We need to build maps and steering wheels.
I might even suspect that solving collective action is the great filter that we have in front of us.
I don't see much difference to the "old world" either. Yellow journalism existed in the 1800s. We just do it in a more modern format.
If you want to be a content creator on these platforms and you don't want to be captured by the algorithms you have to be very conscious that algorithmic capture is a constant danger. You have to be willing to lose algorithmic points and give up income that you're getting from the platform if push comes to shove. You have to constantly be on your guard.
When I was a kid there was Mr Wizard, and then Bill Nye, but it was far more limited than what I watch with my kid.
The land of videos with <1M views is full of gems - and many of the top notch science channels (eg Mark Rober), still give their creators a handsome income. And many of the channels, like Rober, do regularly crack 1M and the recommended list.
And if it was happening, what would it look like?
I have a theory, but I don't want to give the game away yet.
It is not created merely by the sharing of videos over the internet.
Such sharing was happening long before Google Video or YouTube existed.
Some HN commenters want readers to believe that YouTube, with its ridiculous "recommendations", is synonymous with sharing videos over a computer network... and that it's impossible for internet subscribers to share videos with other subscribers without a YouTube middleman. They warn that YouTube must exist, that surveillance, advertising and recommendations are essential, otherwise sharing video over the internet will become impossible and terrible things will happen.
News flash. Terrible things are happening as a result of YouTube. More specifically as a result of Google's surveillance and advertising tactics.
My reason for starting a channel was to have a discussion around some of the projects I was working on that I found interesting. This never materialized. I never had a ton of engagement, but if I did most questions asked by viewers that are answered in the video.
I monetized my videos and started making beer-money amounts of revenue. I put more and more time into them but never gained traction. I had a few "evergreen" videos that would make maybe a thousand bucks a year, the rest of the videos hardly got any views at all.
Eventually, I found myself making videos to feed the algorithm not because it was a project that I wanted to do. This is where I had to stop. I realized that I just don't like editing videos.
My channel makes no revenue now because YouTube requires an upload schedule and shorts. Mr Beast's job sounds awful to me. The videos I make now only get dozens to hundreds of views when they're published. I mostly share them with friends and in online communities where the info contained might be helpful.
The creators that find success need to pump out content at a ridiculous rate. It is a faustian bargain that sucks in a lot of people.
So it’s possible you would’ve burned out anyways, despite any algorithmic considerations.
> The ideal creator has no distance between themselves and their persona. They have been interpellated by audience metrics; their subjective experience already takes audience reactions into account.
> Or more simply, YouTubers are not “Creators” but Creations. Audiences, rationalized by the platform, and the vloggers who upload the videos those audiences consume are not separable either theoretically or empirically.
It's pretty obvious, too, because these YouTubers have a distinct theme where their popularity is dependent on 1) the whims and algos of the platform on one side, and 2) the ability for their audience to care and relate to something pretty dang detached and irrelevant from their everyday lives (unboxing, aggressive acts of charity, etc).
While you hear plenty (Most? All?) YouTubers complain about the ranking algorithms & capriciousness of their overlord, I don't believe most channels are quite as vapid as those at the top of the heap. Lots of deep subjective content, and lots of freaking annoying CapCut edits, but also a primary focus on meaningful content relevent to viewers. These people may not be getting rich from their vlogging, but it's also not fair to call what most of them are doing "vlogging", either. It's video-based short form content curation for a clearly identified audience. Not remotely the same as how the big guns like Mr Beast have to view their work [where they're much more similar to a cable TV network or a commercial production company than an independent producer].
No blood, no violence, no bad words. And the words YouTube deems bad are somehow much stricter than what I grew up with. Many words related to violence (abuse, assault, etc) words related to death (killed, executed, etc) words related to drugs (took me a while to figure out what a suspect was even saying when their speech was censored to "they drank and used s**d" I finally figured out it was speed aka meth)
It's amazing to see how sanitized things have become, almost to the point of absurdity. Does making it so that people can't say the word "abuse" somehow eliminate abuse from the world?
He can't use the word "vape", or the video gets de-monetized...
There's a fine line between "content created for X people interested in Y topic in Z form" and "content that's relevant to my viewers."
The former is a channel that is avoiding the "creator" described by the author. The latter is on a path towards the author's "creator."
For a long time, the two can be very similar. The group you are tailoring your content for and your viewers won't necessarily diverge quickly, especially in niche areas or highly technical fields. But they will inevitably diverge.
Worth noting that the form this takes will depend on the topic.
It's rare to find a creator that can avoid this trap long-term. I see it even with small channels I follow.
This is such a broad and general statement for a platform that is unfathomably big.
I don't any of the mass market Mr Beast, Nastya, Ryan videos on my feed. At all. I get smaller (but still large) creators with videos that actually engage the mind. Example: https://www.youtube.com/@blancolirio
But I guess that's the distinction between a Youtuber and Creator.
It's not great to see young kids addicted to content designed primarily to rob them of their money with false claims of success. "Oh, if you send me money, buy my shit, or subscribe to my channel, you could win millions of dollars!"
That sort of exploitative media should be illegal (and in the case of MrBeast appears to be illegal in some cases).
We really are very susceptible to living in "default mode".
Isn't this sort of one of the themes from The Prestige(2006)? That certain magicians were so dedicated to their craft that they became inseparable from it. The performance never actually stopped
If one spends most of their waking hours in front of camera producing video after video it's bound to happen subconsciously whether they like it or not.
David Cassidy and Shirley McClain come to mind for me on this.
Don't ever believe you "know" someone you don't. Parasocial relationships are harmless at the low level but quickly become toxic.
Always meet your heros so you can understand they are normal and flawed humans
We cannot know all the thoughts and experiences of another human being. Even when that person is 100% genuine, there will be aspects to that person that will surprise you!
And that doesn't even get into the weeds of autistics, ADHDers, and intelligent people (I happen to be all three) -- who learn from an early age they have to pretend to be something they aren't, otherwise they'll face intense bullying and ostracision. And even then, there's going to be something "off" about them ....
---
https://youtu.be/uckLb_8LEGQ?t=36s
ANGIER
(scorn)
It's misdirection- he leaves those things lying around to make you think he's using a double.
OLIVIA
All the time? He doesn't know when I'm looking
ANGIER
All the time, Olivia- that's who he is, that's what it takes- he lives his act, don't you see?!
---
Also the dialogue after the fishbowl performance https://youtu.be/J8ZXT2HTxqE?t=34s
BORDEN
(points)
This is the trick. This is the performance, right here. This is why no one can detect his method. Total devotion to his art...
We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.Bo Burnham said it really well in an interview:
"I'm saying I feel very stressed because I feel like I'm on stage panicking in front of thousands of people... and I feel like I'm trapped within a performance and I'm freaking out because of it. And 13-year-olds were going 'yeah yeah, I feel like that every day'. And I go 'what are you talking about?' and I realize that the stresses of a C-list comedian were democratized and given to an entire generation.... Social media has made life a performance."
I'm not sure where the original interview is, but I found the quote at 9:43 of this analysis of Inside: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHat1OlMPeY
Content creators feels more perverse because they are sacrificing themselves to making metrics go up. The act of creation is in service to metrics that please an algorithm so views go up.
If the magicians didn't care about magic at all but were obsessed with optimizing the show around ticket sales it would be a shitty movie.
Could it be that "craft" until now has been a high dimensional and abstract conceptual navigation exercise, for which some people had both (1) the compass of intuition and (2) the drive. Replacing craft with metrics means that people without the high dimensional intuition/compass (but with the drive) can still play a part in the game.
So maybe this is just another example of unbundling and specialisation process, that is democratising access to renown (or whatever the wealth of "renown" is, in the sense of network topology)
Of course, if the compass that is replaced with metrics is miscalibrated in the system, the end point can still be a very sick society (even if access to the renown in that sick society is more equitably distributed by some measures)
It's a horrid part of the cave system imo but it's obviously viable.
I often think of minds as very spatial as well, in that introducing new concepts to a mind requires it be tailored to specific characteristics of that mind, like tuning the parameters of a autonomous vehicle before sending it off on its own into the mind, hoping it makes it deeply within.
The truly impressive and powerful concepts (which I understand to have very specific and complex high dimensional symmetry), are those which I assume are the ones that we call poetic or beautiful or resonant. They are the ones whose shape is finely tuned to resonate deeply with the shared shapes of many many human minds.
Often I think of people in their minds as people in mazes, and there are certain areas of the maze people go to, that sometimes certain neurotypes can imagine well, but others can only treat as a black box (though really, they are the maze itself)
It feels like the YouTube algorithm is either way more manual than we think or it has rules that end up showing the same things. Or both. Or something more sinister.
I've never, ever clicked on short videos with girls in skimpy clothing doing something "based" and yet it keeps trying to hook me up on those. Even after clicking around very different videos (infosec, low level code, workshop). It's like it refuses to learn what I want to watch.
When watching with my account on YouTube mobile app it keeps trying to push dumber content. I wasted years giving it feedback with "not interested" and "Don't recommend channel". It only keeps pushing videos of channels I liked 1 video 1 time long ago. If I like a DefCon video the algo will pester me with garbage shock content for infosec.
Recently, I liked a cppcon wait free programming presentation and then YouTube started pestering me (again) with the Indian programming 101 videos with terrible sound and rushed video. I had to give it like 10 "not interested" / "Don't recommend channel" for it to stop.
Ironicaly, about a year ago, I started watching a really good ML channel by an Indian guy with great animations an in-depth explanations. Top level. And YouTube rarely suggested his content. I had to go to his channel to look for things or search the channel name and some keywords. It feels like YouTube punishes sophisticated content.
I think there is no true algorithm. Or that it has rules to never suggest me the content I actually want to watch.
And don't get me started with YouTube search.
Sadly most of the content I want to watch is hidden deeply in the garbage pile of YouTube.
There was another post on HN recently about "multi-armed bandit" problems and an algorithm which occasionally retries previously nonperforming choices on purpose to "test" if their performance has changed.
I wonder if YouTube's algorithm works similarly, i.e. occasionally suggesting a video that has nothing to do with your preferences, to see if it can hook you.
That satisfaction threshold is probably understood for someone like me who doesn't browse anonymously
This has made me realize that YouTube is like the leading platform for piracy and porn. If you have any interest in sports the frontpage will be littered with pirated livestreams from channels like ESPN, and while they may not be explicitly pornography, the skimpy girl content is basically that.
My experience with their algorithm between 2014 and ~2020 was that autoplay would quickly turn into a form of video diarrhea composed largely of Jordan Peterson and Lex Fridman. Was pretty bizarre because I only watched a few Peterson videos in the beginning, mostly his "Maps Of Meaning" videos which I think are mostly poppycock, and ever since then YouTube would quickly bring me back to his content even though I was never navigating to it organically. I had to resort to clicking "Not interested" and "Don't recommend channel" on several videos, which sort of worked, but it wasn't fool proof.
These days it happens way less often, though usually that loop contains a lot of "gurus" in general and less of Peterson.
I hope I never have to hear the voices of Jordan Peterson or Lex Fridman again. I'm not a fan of either one, but YouTube insisted I was for many years.
That, or the Peterson pipeline is a good representation of a local maximum: a fairly obvious way a set of videos can direct people to related videos and increase the appetite for them. That'd produce algorithmic reinforcement without anybody getting paid. Apart from Youtube, content-agnostically hungering for being paid in views on their platform.
It could have sent a very strong signal that 'this content maximally sends a statistically significant number of viewers down MASSIVE youtube rabbitholes never to emerge, therefore take the gamble and try to show everyone the content, ???, profit!'
- Same streamer, different video
- Different streamer
- Far right pundit blasts immigration
- Video game streamer
- Video game streamer
- Video game review
- Same streamer, similar content
- Ben Shapiro OWNS Liberals with FACTS
- Video game streamer
- Video game streamer
I've never watched one of these blowhards in my life, but man, YouTube thinks I'd love it. Because I watch video games? Is this the gamer-to-alt-right pipeline I keep reading about?
Edit: 2010 and earlier. To me old youtube is before the rise of Minecraft. There's probably a better threshold but that's the one that comes to mind.
That being said, occasionally I do have to go into my Google data and clear/clean the watch history to reorient my recommendations.
> That being said, occasionally I do have to go into my Google data and clear/clean the watch history to reorient my recommendations.
Can you elaborate on this? What effect does this produce for your specifically?
Feels a whole lot like the dumb emails I get from places like Home Depot, where because I bought a table saw they feel I should know about all these other table saws they have.
I'm sure there's plenty of interesting content about topics I haven't searched for, but YouTube seems intent on not letting me out of whatever bubble it thought out for me.
Discovery of content happens in the sidebar from videos I enjoy now, and only when I'm in the mood to discover something.
Some habits I have is to subscribe to channels which I truly enjoy, instead of marking as "not interested" I select "do not suggest channel", and be cautious of click-bait titles. If I get lured in, I remove them from my history.
So for me it's mostly great, though I get your frustration as well. For example I recently watched a couple of informative videos on the LA fires as I have some relatives living in the area, and suddenly my feed is tons of that and little else.
Recently I found a video of a young kid doing a taste test of a sour soda, and then demanding his dad come over from the other room to try it too. At one point the kid does a really loud burp that I found funny. Obviously not something that will do numbers, but it satisfies my people-watching itch.
I specifically do not normally view "pure" news or similar. I might make the rare exception, like in case of the LA fire where I saw a clip from PBS. That is a very conscious choice, for reasons similar to what you express.
Personally, I added uBlock filters so the home page is empty and recommended videos aren't shown. I only ever go to subscriptions now.
There's a setting to turn it off, no need for uBlock filters for that
Its worse than that. I thought that Youtube worked as you described, trying to find videos suited to your interests but it actually works the other way around.
Youtube has a series of rabbit holes that it knows maximise engagement, so its trying to filter you the human down one of those rabbit holes. Do you fit the mr beast ssniperwolf hole, or the jordan peterson joe rogan rabbit hole? Howabout 3 hour video essay rabbit hole, is that one your shape?
Its designing paths for engagment and filtering humans down not filtering videos for humans, its perverse and awful and it explains why the algorithm simply does not work for humans, because you are not the target audience, you are the data being sorted.
It's _almost_ like the old youtube.
[page-subtype="home"] #contents > ytd-rich-item-renderer:nth-child(-n + 12) {
display: none;
}I missed the end of the recent Australia vs India cricket series so I searched for highlights from the final day of play. Since then for the past 2 weeks my homescreen has been an endless stream of cricket related videos. For some reason it has a particular focus on podcasts related to cricket.
Do you subscribe to creators you enjoy, and like their videos? You still need to feed the algorithm.
I think the main thing is Jimmy Donaldson (MrBeast) has stated numerous times his goal in life (at least publicly) is to make the best YouTube videos possible. Realistically, a lot of the things that feed into drama are related to that goal: overwork, inadequate planning. They take 'move fast and break things' to the extreme to make the videos they make, and unfortunately the 'things' they break are often people.
The tough thing is, at least until recently, it seemed like MrBeast and the 'Beastification' of YouTube (where all content is loud, shouty, super-quick cuts) was inevitable. And in many corners (especially kids-centric content) it kind-of is. But luckily I think some people have pulled back. I feel like we're currently in kind of the anti-thesis of the '2001 Space Odyssey' era of entertainment. Instead of long, thoughtful content for consumption, it's fast-paced, zero-thought content with splashy colors.
Although MrBeast has done some good things with it, I find the way he flaunts his wealth perverse.
It’s all about incentives. I think we should nudge society towards rewarding kids who choose fruitful careers.
The specific criticism of "flaunting their huge wealth" does not apply at least to MrBeast -- he specifically is not very wealthy (I mean, he may be, but he says that he is not and he does not flaunt any such wealth; on the few occasions where his personal life is highlighted it seems he lives rather humbly). He claims to put all of the money he earns back into his videos; so when he makes enough to buy a "lambo" or whatever he will buy one and give it away to whoever can swallow the most toothpicks or whatever.
MrBeast does not push a life of luxury as his lifestyle, he presents a life of being a celebrity influencer whose life is making more spectacles.
But if you want to grow up to be MrBeast, you want to just be famous. Maybe you want to be MrBeast-famous and also buy cool yachts and lambos and private islands for yourself, but that's not the "lifestyle" that he's selling. The lifestyle he's selling is "be famous but still hang out with your loser friends but get to give away and/or destroy awesome things".
This is maybe not the thing we should aspire to, but for kids I think it's fine to imagine that for yourself the way that you imagine being an NFL quarterback or something. Not every kid imagines growing up and being a moderately successful CPA.
It's too bad that nuanced discussion doesn't do too well on social media.
I picked a random post on the home page, this one for example:
https://old.reddit.com/r/clevercomebacks/comments/1i1b4tn/i_...
The comments are all
"The oligarchs would never go for it."
or "It’s a cult." and on and on.
I think this is particularly true in rage bait posts on Reddit, which is most of the home page these days.
I should acknowledge that our industry has always had some form of this - but it was contained predominantly to mailing lists/forums/blogs and eventually Twitter. It felt like all of these mediums (yes, even Twitter) required some form of proof that you’re an authority or experienced on what you’re writing about. I don’t feel like that’s what’s happening with YouTube/Twitch here; these creators may very well be skilled/experienced/authorities (and I am explicitly not saying they are or aren’t) but I don’t see anywhere near the level of healthy skepticism that I feel like we’ve always had in our industry.
Maybe it’s a generational divide as the window of developers shifts. Maybe it’s just the sheer size of the distribution channels now. I’m open to being wrong.
tl;dr: Something about these mediums turbo charges the information in a way that I’m not sure is healthy.
Was that a result of economic consolidation ?
Or am I mistaken and the yellow press never went away ? (And why does it seem like it did for a while ?)
The logic underpinning this is that if a person is a jerk they will be downvoted- therefore there is an incentive to not be a jerk.
However, because the person on the other side is anonymous and therefore people can’t instinctively presume good faith, upvoting system turn in to a voting system - the goal is not to develop ideas, but to submit ones people will most agree with. When the main danger is apathy, there is no reason from self-moderation. Nerds are not immune.
On most social media people aren't anonymous, they are pseudonymous - this can still have an impact on your behavior when you know that even non-moderators can look up your post history.
But I guess that a lot of posters are still going to feel pseudo-anonymous, because looking up still requires a lot of effort... at least until for a few they become famous enough (dang, pg...) that their pseudo-anonymity is gone.
That being said I think the author here is taking some things for granted. An example of this to me is "As I wrote in the book, “If creators are speaking their authentic truths, how can they also be accountable to audience feedback? I am personally bemused to see 'authenticity' invoked as a criterion for what is ultimately and obviously a performance". So firstly I don't view authenticity as some binary thing that is mutually exclusive with taking feedback and context. Just because I act differently with my boss, my parents, and my friends based on feedback from them I'm not being inherently inauthentic. To me authenticity and external pressures are at odds but from the few videos and interviews I've seen of Jimmy he seems to genuinely enjoy creating the spectacles he does so beneath all the artifice in the videos I think you're still seeing the core of Jimmy making content that he wants to make. Anyway, I think if you stop looking at stuff like authenticity as less rigid rules for how to act and more as a spectrum or very broad category what the creators say makes more sense (because it's not just Mr Beast saying similar things).
“Luckily, I’d say I’m a pretty predictable guy.” Luck has nothing to do with it, Mr. MrBeast. Your predictability is the result of years of an information diet consisting of audience feedback metrics. You are the proudest creation of the YouTube Apparatus."
Audience feedback metrics are only part of what a creator does. They are people with complex motivations and being sensitive to audience feedback metrics doesn't eliminate that. I could see saying the ecosystem being a synthesis of demand (I mean that's just trivially true, we don't need an essay on Mr Beast to say that) but from interviews Mr Beast is very much a product of the pressure of YouTube mixed with the very specific nature of who Jimmy is as a person (from interviews he seems like a pretty weird guy and his videos definitely reflect his particular quirks).
Edit: I'm trying to see how the author and I agree but unless the author is saying that people who succeed on a platform are the people that do things that are successful on the platform (i.e. align with audience metrics) then I don't think we agree. And I don't think that's all they are saying because that's just trivially true everywhere and it would make all the talk about philosophy and authenticity useless cruft. I think that Mr Beast is the sorta platonic ideal of a "content creator" driven by metrics and even he cannot escape his own Jimmy Donaldson-ness in his videos.
It's a view I sympathize with, even though I'm reticent to apply it to specific cases like this. Rather, when we look at these systems, we should treat their demands as prescriptive, rather than descriptive. Spotify is an excellent example. Say the recommendation algorithm starts recommending a genre, but not for any aesthetic reason. Over time other musicians that internalize the aesthetics associated with that genre and will succeed because they also get picked up by the algorithm. These artists are succeeding by making algorithm bait, but they're also being authentic because the algorithm they're courting shaped their sensibilities as artists and as people.
The article isn't making a novel observation that people are shaped by the systems around them but applying that idea to the creator economy.
There are indeed “echo chambers” on YouTube, but they are filled with an active and demanding audience. When the YouTuber uploads their video, whatever originality, creativity or meaning they intended to communicate is reduced to the public audience measures that the platform appends to the video. This quantification puts the video into immediate comparison with the YouTuber’s previous videos, and indeed with every video on the platform.
It requires incredible willpower to ignore the reverberations of the ever-present audience on social media, to maintain an independent artistic vision or coherent ideological position. And for YouTubers attempting to make a living, the vast and intense competition makes it impossible to do so. The audience can simply click away if the YouTuber displeases them. The pressure of having millions of bosses issuing conflicting demands can produce “Creator burnout” or worse.
My poetic aspiration is that whenever you read the words “YouTube Creator” you think instead of “Audience Creation.” Social media does not create powerful Influencers but rather powerless marionettes, dancing jerkily to quantified audience tugs.
What is abhorrently revolting is the total amount of “Gold Digger” videos +100 and counting..
https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=76583c995a4c1c88&rlz=1...
The people in them make me feel like the world's most accomplished actor.
This is the NEW children "fables" that are teaching the next-gen modern "morality". My 11yr old made me aware of it, and I've seen like 20 of them now.. about 22% are OK in terms of messaging/values. But the danger lies in that the 9-13yr old kids watching this stuff will take most of it literally as 'this is how the real-world works'.
Sadly no one else if filling this niche better and he seems to have found the algo.
I knew that even 15 years ago when I was watching crazy pranks pulled by French YouTuber Rémi Gaillard[0]....he was so popular back in the day on YouTube.
Make people watch more YouTube.
Crazy videos might become passe or burn people out, at which point the 'formula' will change, but the underlying reality is the same. It's a paperclip maximizer. To succeed at YouTube make people watch more YouTube.
Yea but how do you do that? By making more compelling content than competitors. That's the basic formula.
There's whole subcultures of people doing unboxing videos. People framing existing videos as "unintentional ASMR" (https://www.youtube.com/c/PureUnintentionalASMR)
The point is : it doesn't matter what you upload. As long as it allows Google to show ads to people.
Also, I think his videos might be predating YouTube, or at least predating YouTube dominating the format ? IIRC he used to self-host as well as publish on other platforms ?
Does "long lag time" or "deadly" mean something else in cybernetic terms than in regular terms? I found the "in cybernetics terms" insert quite puzzling.
> Cybernetics is the scientific study and mathematical modeling of regulation and control in systems, focusing on the flow of information and how it is used by the system to control itself.
So maybe a long lag time is deadly because they lose control of the system? That doesn't really make sense to me either though because what control do they have in the first place? The author says as much when they call it an ever-shifting target.
>Dead time is the delay from when a controller output (CO) signal is issued until when the measured process variable (PV) first begins to respond.
https://controlguru.com/dead-time-is-the-how-much-delay-vari...
A few years ago, if you opened up YouTube without being logged in, the algorithm would show you its default recommendations in the purest state, uninfluenced by your proclivities. MrBeast and similar dumpster clickbait videos were prominently featured. These days, I think you have to at least search for and watch some things before you are told what to watch.
If MrBeast has ever shown up on my YT front page in the past, I slapped YT's hand until it stopped. Haven't had a problem since.
I assume most of us aren't using YouTube for that kind of doom-scrolling click bait scream face 'content' about nothing in particular, but I could be wrong.
It was the one where he "gave away" a chocolate factory, after he did the Willy Wonka thing with his chocolate bars where you could win a chance to be on the show. I clicked because I was curious what he was actually "giving away", if it was actual chocolate factory property, shares in his snack brand, or some disused industrial building. They had a "candy room" with plants supposedly made of real sweets but it looked like a cheap imitation of the Willy Wonka movie, the walls were mostly white and it seemed like it could have used more set dressing. The actual content was a game show (seems to be a lot of his videos) but it didn't make good use of the space they built, I think it was a basic scavenger hunt. Then the contestants had to throw a giant Mento into a giant Coke bottle, it was impressively large but the game wasn't exciting at all, they just threw the disc at the bottle over and over without any drama. MrBeast even said something like "we're going to be here a while" so he started their ad read, that's when I turned it off.
Unlike a TV game show or reality show the contestants had no characterization, they didn't play up any rivalries or reactions or drama. It seemed like they were there doing the most basic challenges so MrBeast could talk about what they made and give away something expensive at the end. I found it all very odd and it reinforced that I am very far from the median viewer since I found none of it interesting.
My wife is probably closer to a YouTube-native watcher, in the sense that what she's watching is created for YouTube specifically, but even then, it's informational deep-dives, lately on liminal spaces lore, Twin Peaks fan theories, and 3d printing. She raved glowingly lately about a 4-hour long Twin Peaks explainer. I'm sure that is many things, but it isn't flashy, short, there is no skimpy clothing, bright colors, or whatever it is that YouTube is supposed to be incentivizing. Whoever made it almost certainly made no money off of the effort and dumped decades of his life into the study of what ultimately came out there, and nobody is watching it because of the algorithm or a clickbaity thumbnail. The only people watching something like that are the most serious of serious nerds who deeply love Twin Peaks and probably have for most of a lifetime.
It's not even like he draws it out. Like lets say its time to blow something up as a finale: we see 2-3 shots of them waiting, we see it explode in 3 angles we get 2-3 reactions and boom video is probably over.
The trick is finding something else to replace it during that time at the end of the day when I don’t feel like I have the mental energy for anything else.
I feel the opposite, everything seems reasonable, business-centric, and marketing-aware strategies.
In his defense (!?), most of what's churned out by the streaming platforms, hollywood, and the music industry, is also not very bothered by lack of meaning.
The "Pixar apparatus" is definitely increasingly consumed by audience demand, but they're at a minimum in a transitional phase: something like Seeing Red would never get workshopped out of committees.
Youtube and other social media (emphasis on media) is ground zero for the decay of meaning into intensity; the ultimate incestuous product of auto-simulacra.
I think YouTube was so exciting initially because it was so authentic, and now it’s back to big studios.
You could argue the movie being made outside of the traditional studio system is case and point of this phenomenon.
This is great. I think there's a body of research to be done regarding the creation of self in the age of social media. (Not just creators but everyone)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpellation
(Specifically the top item, "the process by which we encounter a culture's or ideology's values and internalize them").
Edit: Doh! On checking the article, that's even the same link the author embedded!
PHILOSOPHY (of an ideology or discourse) bring into being or give identity to (an individual or category).
—-
I read it as saying the audience and their reaction to the content is what gives the “creator” their identity.
That's a large part of the field of Cyberpsychology, and of course there's quite a body of research already.
"YouTubers are not “Creators” but Creations. Audiences, rationalized by the platform, and the vloggers who upload the videos those audiences consume are not separable either theoretically or empirically."
The central thesis that demand creates supply is also just very obviously false, no one was searching for "100 identical twins fight for $250k" before Mr beast made that video. People watch Mr beast because they want 20 minutes of whimsical predictably mind numbing colorful emotional fast paced distraction and Mr beast fills that need perfectly with videos of all kinds. He transports viewers to a fantasy land far beyond their real world, where boredom doesn't exist and crazy things are possible. No one knew they wanted an iPod until Steve jobs showed it to them; they just wanted a better CD player. Same thing with YouTube; people just show up and click on something the algorithm puts in their way, there isn't a demand for anything really. No one knew they wanted a Mr beast. The consumer demand is some combination of distraction, entertainment, or education, it's not much deeper than that.
That's actually not true. MrBest is saying the opposite in the leaked PDF, that fundamentals don't change much since he started.
Imagine someone is actually an actor. They might play two different roles, one in a character and show they find boring, and one in relatable character in a show whose message they think is important. Don't you think their performance in the second one might be more authentic, despite being a "performance" in both cases?
This essay starts interesting, but I think it overreaches at the end.
[*] Spanning 5 hours.
Who are you to deny their authenticity, though? If authenticity is being true to one’s own character, and one’s entire character is driven by YouTube video metric optimization (and perhaps ultimately by the profit thereby obtained), then isn’t their behavior on screen authentic?
Put another way, if MrBeast says “your goal is to make me excited to be on screen”, he’s explicitly saying he doesn’t want to have to act or otherwise be inauthentic on screen. Whether his excitement about a certain topic is tied to the views he expects it to garner is immaterial, if that’s his authentic motivation.
Or put yet another way, what drives anybody’s “authentic” behavior? What audience are they playing to? It may not be the entire internet, but it’s certainly influenced by “performance” in front of friends and family. We’re all Creations of our environment. MrBeast has just kind of found himself in an environment where feedback from YouTube videos motivates him and creates a ton of positive feedback loops.
In what sense is any of this authentic?Best thing I’ve read this week. I am happy to say I have never seen a Mr. Beast video, and now I will be sure never to see one in the future.
The world has so much good film, music, novels, even video games and TV - in a choice between any of those and watching a YouTuber, why would anyone choose the latter?
Woodworking, machining, 3D printing, electronics, that sort of thing. A modern alternative to magazines basically, or to regional/cable/'public access' (I don't really know how it works, not sure if we ever had that sort of thing here) TV shows like the fictional 'Tool Time' show within the sitcom Home Improvement if you ever saw that.
I got started via 'how to do x' for a couple of DIY things, realised there's so much stuff like that, started watching for fun/interest (vs. actually having the job to do myself) and from there the more 'maker' (hate the term) side of doing it for a hobby to create a thing rather than household DIY/repair.
Surely the urge to cheat is unbearable with millions of dollars on the hook. (Alot of apps on the app stores also claim to have quarter million 5 star reviews. Uhhuh)
> haha just kidding. MrBeast does not have sex. YouTube doesn’t allow pornography, so what would be the point?
Why was this included in the post? What does it add? It seems … just sort of mean spirited and out of place in an otherwise good article.
This gives me the smell and sight of red flags in their methodology. It reeks of unsuspected hidden variables. Such as what is really going on is that focusing on lighting in the beginning of the video simply makes people put more thought into the into thereby having a hook that keeps people interested, rather than lighting having anything to do with it.
That means this is just a pseudoscience blog of throwing darts to me. Sure call me a curmudgeon or whatever.