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?
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.
But he is definetly flaunting something. I'd maybe label it as flaunting generosity, or the ability to change people's lifes
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
So does he need to do it to remain profitable or does PE need to do it to pay for all their overhead / etc?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"?
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.
Please don’t straw man. Engage with the arguments in earnest, with what the person said, not what you imagine they said.
Do you think we're extrapolating too much into the meaning of "decent human"?
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.