MrBeast 'spends millions reverse engineering the algorithms on each platform'
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I’ve seen only clips of his videos here and there, but assumed he was somewhat naturally gifted in creating content that interested people. Reading this, and his obsession with algorithms, his job seems like a hellish nightmare.
I recently stumbled upon ‘book influencers’ on YouTube and same desperation is holding them hostage. There’s no way this is fun for anyone. Being so obsessed with clicks and likes and retention and whatever. Then trying to earn money from it all. I’d literally rather be a vagabond.
E.g., we see this with the way PewDiePie “retired.” My understanding is that he only makes videos that he wants and enjoys making these days.
But that idea assumes Mr. Beast isn’t just an amoral grifter who is in this job to do exactly what we see described here. He has no passion for making videos or the content of his videos, his passion is wealth and influence accumulation.
On the other end of the spectrum we see people like Technology Connections or Tim Traveler who are completely uninterested in sponsorships or marketing efforts and they get to just make the videos they love making. There is zero view optimization when Alec makes a 1 hour video about heat pumps. He knows there’s going to be massive drop-off and doesn’t care. It’s obvious to point out that Mr. Beast got his bag orders of magnitude above and beyond creators like that and could easily stop his insane operation and do the same thing.
You and I would call this a hellish nightmare but that’s not how narcissist and narcissist-adjacent folks feel about it.
That is what he loves to make, there is nothing more to it.
Imagine what all those billionaires could do good for humanity with all that money they can never spend. Instead, they chose to make the world worse and gain even more money they can't spend until they die.
It would be sad if it wouldn't be so terrible.
They are giving people what they want. Surely they have given more people what those people wanted than you have. They have become very, very good at giving people what they want. What, after all, is an "algorithm"?
It's the people who want things that aren't in their own best interest. And when you take it upon yourself to "do good" in ways that deviate from what people want, you are taking the position of "the people don’t know what’s best for them, but I do."
The "they" in your "they chose to make the world worse," is the majority of the human populace.
Edit: Basically, https://youtu.be/TKC2c225EnE
Exploiting peoples short attention spans and addiction. There are papers on it these days and I'm quite sure he knows those all.
> They are giving people what they want
It is 2026. We know that this kind of optimisation is exploiting weakness in peoples minds. I mean, you say it yourself: "It's the people who want things that aren't in their own best interest.". This is why algorithms don't measure what people want but what keeps them watching. Beast's algorithms don't ask people what they want.
> And when you take it upon yourself to "do good" in ways that deviate from what people want, you are taking the position of "the people don’t know what’s best for them, but I do."
This is usually how a prospering and successful civilisation works. You develop a justice system, laws and regulations so people don't smash their heads until their families are extinguished for example.
> The "they" in your "they chose to make the world worse," is the majority of the human populace.
I'd say there is a huge difference between Bob influencing George so they eat at a certain diner because he likes the waitress and Google running a quasi monopoly on online videos.
My comment was about what Billionaires do with their money and them lobbying for tax cuts, pushing down wages as far as possible or exploiting mechanisms to trap them into addiction is not "what people want".
Further reading:
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/digital-addiction-evidenc...
https://www.nber.org/papers/w28936
@Edit I hope you saw the whole movie because dumping assets they know are nearly worthless on its own clients and counterparties before they find ou is not "giving people what they want". It works only because the buyers don’t know what they are buying.
Yes, and my comment was about the idea that these billionaires are often man-made, the population that funnels wealth to them could instead, in the first place, funnel wealth to the causes they ostensibly want the billionaires to support, cutting out the middleman. But very few people actually want world peace or a child in the third world getting a meal, as opposed to say, another can of coke or to stay home and get Doordash.
> This is usually how a prospering and successful civilisation works. You develop a justice system, laws and regulations so people don't smash their heads until their families are extinguished for example.
Agreed. It's par for the course and not necessarily evil. But worth being aware of the hypocrisy of deciding what "right" is, for others.
> @Edit I hope you saw the whole movie because dumping assets they know are nearly worthless on its own clients and counterparties before they find ou is not "giving people what they want". It works only because the buyers don’t know what they are buying.
Are you equating algorithms to fraud? That doesn't seem quite right.
People don't choose to funnel wealth to billionaires like a donation. A lot of it comes through low wages, rent and asset ownership. You can't donate money you were never paid.
We have a different tool for the billionaires to support. It's called taxes and this is what they really really hate.
> But very few people actually want world peace or a child in the third world getting a meal, as opposed to say, another can of coke or to stay home and get Doordash.
Buying a coke doesn't mean someone prefers it to a feeding a child. It means the coke is on the shelf for 2€ and world peace isn't.
> Agreed. It's par for the course and not necessarily evil. But worth being aware of the hypocrisy of deciding what "right" is, for others.
Alright we agree on laws, now every law decides for others. So the question isn't whether someone decides, it's who. A parliament can be voted out. A lobbyist or an algorithm team can't.
> Are you equating algorithms to fraud? That doesn't seem quite right.
The Margin Call point was about the film you linked.
Besides that: the proper term for what algorithms do is "engagement design". Which is more like a slot machine: built to exploit weaknesses people don't fully see in themselves.
There are even laws regulating it based upon scientific research See Article 25 of the Digital Services Act of the EU: https://www.eu-digital-services-act.com/Digital_Services_Act...
People are multifaceted, as it turns out.
Epstein also claimed that Bill Gates wanted to try to give that STI medication to Melinda French Gates in secret. "
[1]: https://www.npr.org/2026/02/03/nx-s1-5697080/melinda-french-...
Example: Drew Houston, creator of Dropbox who is/was a user here, is a billionaire. He didn't steal food out of starving people's mouths - he created a product that people willingly gave him money for, because the problem Dropbox solved was more beneficial than the subscription cost.
Milton Friedman - 1979 https://www.tiktok.com/@businessblurb/video/7692147999962582...
Hope because it is a dead end ideology and believing shows that evil peoples horizon doesn't reach that far and there is a wall they're unable to cross. In the end this will be their end too.
Yes sure, there is no society right now which is not based on greed (it is a very basic view but, let's work with it for the moment) however the reason we, as a humanity thrived and got so far is because it was more then greed. People got together beyond their families, later beyond their clans to grow bigger. Those who preferred greed did not succeed as a society.
Friedman lists Einstein. Einstein developed his special relativity in 1905 while employed at the Swiss Federal Patent Office in Bern. That was literally a government bureau. He studied at ETH Zurich, a federal, state-funded university. His work was built on works of others, published in publicly funded academic journals. Science IS shared work. And I mean...Einstein wrote on this topic: “Why Socialism?”.
The mass market for his cars depended on public road building. Federal Aid Road Act 1916 he became so successful because of those governmental bureaus and state and society as a whole.
My point is: just because we don't have a system working without greed, doesn't mean that it is some natural law of the universe. We can thrive to develop this society because there is progress in it for the whole of humanity.
While in selfishness, anti-social behaviour and greed, there is only doom and hate. As we see clearly these days.
PS: just to prevent a common derailment technique at this point: I DO NOT believe Socialism is a solution here. I grew up in a socialist state and I know that it is evil just like all other iterations of Socialism have been. It is just another version of greed where the greed doesn't go to greedy investors but to greedy party members.
I'm not saying all greed is bad, but that greed can lead to bad things.
I want things, and that makes me greedy, but I'm not going to steal, cheat, kill, or do other bad things to satiate my greed - for some people, their greed is more powerful than their morality.
For many people though, their greed about wanting to look better in the eyes of others, or other egotistical things, often leads to strife. So that kind or level of greed is not good either.
Innovation can come from other places besides greed, and I am not arguing against the free market or capitalism where your reply with the video seems to maybe indicate that I am.
Another example is Old School Runescape, which has gained a moniker of “second screen game” because a lot of the boring grindy content can be done while focusing on something else.
I’m sure he’s aware of it as all creators have the tools to be aware of these sort of things, I just don’t get the impression from his content that he’s super concerned about taking that information and acting upon it.
I.e., if YouTube didn’t provide any analytics of any kind, I don’t think his content would change.
I don't see any reason why view-maxing and what he loves to make can't be the same thing.
I think he's also doing exacty what he wants to be doing.
The pressure goes the other way around, though. Once somebody’s living depends on it, they have to make content that makes them money.
The only thing that elevated music was when people could see others choices and select music just snowballed to popularity.
Most of reality is shaped like that. Once you see that Elon musk was just in the right asshole location, then you can release the shackles of the "meritocracy" that obscures just random chance and personality choices.
That sounds like René Girard's "mimesis of desire" in which we desire the things because we observe other people desiring them.
Since learning of it I frequently ask myself how much I actually want something, versus "How much do I want this because I feel that I _should_ have it because I saw others desire it?"
Have there been any other studies that attempt to confirm this theory?
This used to be different 10-15 years ago. I remember uploading some random stuff and getting 50k views. Now, I get 50 for essentially the same stuff.
And yes, there are some popular content creators who pretend not to care. I promise you that they spend a lot of time looking at metrics too.
I wouldn’t. It sounds hellish to me. But different strokes for different folks…
I think his first video was just a recording of him counting to one million.
"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. Everything we want will come if we strive for that. Sounds obvious but after 6 months in the weeds a lot of people tend to forget what we are actually trying to achieve here."
He is, but he also was one of the first youtubers who really figured out how to game the modern algos.
That sounds like your SEO average day
He wrote an internal handbook that circulated the Internet a few months back, in which he is describing exactly what he built: a data driven content optimization farm. He isn't creating honestly interesting content (or probably much at all, himself, these days) - he's speed-running some unholy blend of venture-capital risk taking approach with Wall Street level internal pressure. He gives his employees money to test ideas and aggressively iterate on them, while continuously accumulating a detailed model of how the algorithm can be gamed.
Or in short, his organization is social media's paperclip maximizer.
The pioneers of this genre were Big Brother by RTL in the 1990s. It was at least professionally produced.
It is hard not to think of viewbotting.
I think people just might like formulaic repetitive content...
Would you rather be an investor in a “professional” production like Madame Web which was very well produced by well known people and studios and lost a high 8 figure amount, or invested in a YouTube channel that appears to be 20 something friends “bumbling their way to content production” that reliably rakes in millions.
It may look bumbling and disorganized, but they are consistently producing the most viewed content on YouTube and making millions.
I'm sure there are a lot of people (mostly kids) who legitimately watch MrBeast's content, but I'm also convinced that viewbotting to boost numbers is much more widespread than is generally acknowledged across YouTube, Twitch, etc, and the platforms don't really care so long as the advertisers don't make a stink about it.
It seems like every couple of years they'll do some bare minimum pruning of the most egregious outliers to make a show to the advertisers that something is being done and then things slide back to normal within weeks to months.
Anyone in any of these media industries will happily tell you that what gets made next is heavily dependent on what is being consumed now. If you want to sell books, you’re going to do a lot better writing sports romances for 30 somethings or romance fantasy aimed at slightly above young adult. There’s a lot of that coming out and it’s based on the success of Heated Rivalry, ACOTAR and Fourth Wing.
The point is that things haven’t changed in a lot of ways. Traditional media chases popularity and views by tracking metrics just like digital. GP was arguing that this was a new phenomenon. Nonsense, traditional media has always had content that chases trends based on view analytics.
https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6623b7720b009050313e701c/...
(Very interesting read!)
What we do for those is to instrument them such that we know what levels are more difficult, what levels cause more users to abandon the game temporarily, or permanently, etc.
We then dynamically tune these levels until they at least no longer cause abandonment and ideally until they increase engagement.