That's the thing. You have to love that, and that's probably something only people who grew up watching YouTube can feel at a deep level. Generational divides happen like that often.
I do not understand the attraction of nearly all YouTube creators and celebrities. I don't get the appeal. All the videos sound the same and have the same stupid looking tag lines to get you to watch them. Outrageous actions for attention are deeply troubling to me.
And I'm also SUPER aware that it's because it's not for me. I'm not the target demographic at all, and never will be.
At some point you have to realize that the world moves on, and that's just part of getting older. It feels awesome when you're 18-24 and everything is relevant to you. It feels way less awesome when you're over 40 and everything seems to be out of control.
So I’ve switched to using RSS to follow the specific niche creators that add value for me. As a result, my YT experience is entirely unlike what the YT algorithm suggests.
There's also some YouTube-specific extensions like SponsorBlock and DeArrow [1] which specialize in removing distractions from YouTube content - not just the UI.
Well, one could argue that when you’re over 40 a lot more is actually directed at you because that’s when you’ve got the most money to spend. Cars, properties, services, vacations, kids etc. Everything might start to seem to be out of control, but major products finally start to seem to hit the right spot for your taste and promise that control in some sense.
YouTube caters to every niche. Including the more snobbish demographic who “claims” they don’t understand the appeal of YouTube videos (aka don’t understand humans and entertainment in general)
Check out stuff by Johnny Harris , veritasium, etc… for more educational stuff.
Also I didn’t like the ageism comment. I’m about your age and I can definitely understand the appeal of Mr. Beast. I feel a lot of the disdain for him is more snobbery than anything. Some people think they’re better or too good for that type of entertainment. If you truly don’t understand the appeal I think that’s actually a sign of autism. It’s unlikely you’re autistic and it’s more likely to be snobbery disguised as lack of understanding.
Entertainment is usually mindless anyway. It’s not like Shakespeare is some higher form of entertainment. It’s all snobbery that segregates these things. Transformers has more technical complexity and represents a bigger human achievement then Shakespeare.
The technical know how of thousands of people utilizing technology decades in development combined together to achieve the transformers movie to tell a story with more clarity then the equally cliche story of Romeo and Juliet.
It’s all mindless entertainment and class based prejudice.
Johnny Harris makes well produced videos that contain a lot of old information and misinformation. If any of his videos cover a topic you're an expert in, you'll see immediately.
No veritasium is pretty legit imo. Johnny Harris is not bad, I’ve heard the same criticism too. I think he won an award in journalistic integrity at one point.
Theres no YouTuber without criticism. Referring to no one in particular: There’s even offensive snobbish garbage comments equivalent to the banality of Mr. Beast videos here on HN yet this doesn’t reflect the overall vibe here.
Don’t try to bring my overall point down by attacking one particular aspect of one particular example. What should the snobbery of some of the commentary on HN here render the entire site moot? No. My point stands regardless.
> Don’t try to bring my overall point down by attacking one particular aspect of one particular example. What should the snobbery of some of the commentary on HN here render the entire site moot? No. My point stands regardless.
No, you giving two for two garbage suggestions shows how easy it can be for garbage content to masquerade as good. Both on YouTube, in HN comments, and elsewhere.
it's not true of veritasium; he is meticulous about correctness. it's true that his videos do include a lot of old information, but it's correct old information such as the theory of relativity
agreed. This one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oI_X2cMHNe0 generated a lot of controversy and he ended up being right. Hence the criticism. It's almost like the Monty Hall problem for Marilyn vos savant where even people with PhDs derided her for being wrong when in fact they were all wrong themselves.
well, the truth turned out to be quite complicated; see also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Vrhk5OjBP8 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AXv49dDQJw. the result is more complicated than just a single time delay, and the details of the experimental setup (like the wire diameter! and load impedance relative to transmission-line pulse impedance) matter a lot. in alphaphoenix's first experiment, putting 5 volts into a kilometer of wire, he got 0.2 volts across his resistor immediately, then after about 1.6μs, a jump up to about 2 volts, and then a gradual rise to 1.7 volts, some overshoot peaking after another 1.6μs, and then settling back down to the 1.7-volt level
(derek's results in the linked video, which incidentally links to one of the two i linked above, were quantitatively different but qualitatively similar)
the really unintuitive thing about this i think is that people think of electrical energy as flowing inside wires, when actually almost all of it flows around the wires, as veritasium explained quite ably. this is something people doing high-speed pcb layout have to deal with a lot in order to avoid emi problems
as i understand it, derek has a ph.d. in physics, or actually in physics education researchhttps://youtube.fandom.com/wiki/Veritasium. that doesn't mean he knows everything about physics, but generally my experience with people in ph.d. programs is that they're good at listening to counterarguments and admitting when they're wrong, and also seeking out experts before publishing
(i think the veritasium video does contain a minor error in that it says electrons collide with metal ions, which as i understand it is not exactly how ohmic resistance works—the 'electrons' moving through the lattice are not exactly electrons but virtual particles similar to phonons or plasmons, and so the things they scatter off of are not individual ions—but possibly derek knows this and was intentionally simplifying, or possibly my understanding is wrong. i mean, i don't have a ph.d. in anything, much less solid-state quantum physics! derek certainly knows the electrons traveling through the wire aren't point-like particles bouncing around like billiard balls, and that the ions aren't red spheres with plus signs on them, despite depicting them that way.)
>i think the veritasium video does contain a minor error in that it says electrons collide with metal ions, which as i understand it is not exactly how ohmic resistance works—the 'electrons' moving through the lattice are not exactly electrons but virtual particles similar to phonons or plasmons,
electrons are moving through the wire. The virtual particle thing is a misunderstanding on your part I think.
I think your talking about current. Current flows in the opposite direction of electron drift velocity. In the simplified model they use these things called negative and positive charges flowing through the wire and current is defined as the movement of positive charge. These "charges" are of course virtual in nature because it's not what's actually happens.
What actually happens is negative charge is moving and positive charge (protons) are frozen.
And yes of course derek knows that it's a wave traveling through the lattice.
while of course that is correct, that's not what i'm talking about
there is a good introductory presentation in https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/III_13.html but note that it assumes some previous familiarity with quantum mechanics. §13.6 explains that mostly what the electrons (really propagating waves of quantum probability amplitude for there to be an extra electron) are scattering off of is imperfections in the lattice. but that can't be the whole story or all perfect crystals would be superconductors
It offers entertainment value. The educational component of it is it offers education into human psychology when people are presented with challenges and reward, etc. etc. etc.
Mr. Beast videos are actually insightful and educational in certain contexts. It’s just snobbery all the way down.
I studied Shakespeare relatively extensively and while it's obviously clever, probably a big part of his appeal was his plays were vulgar. Also a lot of the things we often attribute to him inventing may have been common turns of phrase back then.
Shakespeare is Wicked or Hamilton is probably a good modern comparison.
Clearly did. It's made up. People are in awe by the complexity, meaning and poetry but in the end it's still bullshit. It's also outdated. People admire classics because of some milestone they passed but after about a decade that milestone becomes cliche.
I’m 39 and thoroughly enjoy MrBeast videos. They’re clever and fun and exciting. Pretty amazing a lot of the things that only he can pull off. And he’s been pulling off impressive stunts for years. He’s incredibly well capitalized at this point, but he grinded there and has been doing novel videos from the start.
Honestly it sounds like a deficiency on your part and that you need to explore some. Because I follow a lot of smart, talented, nerdy, and interesting creators. And my feed is nothing like what you described.
When ever someone describes me what their feed is full of or taken over with, they are secretly telling me what type of bubble they are in and what type of content they actually consume.
What are they doing? They gave free cataract surgery to a huge number of people across the world, built wells, have distributed an ungodly amount of food and the list goes on. Just google the foundation and stop being grumpy. My bet is you will not be able to give away a tiny fraction of what they have in your whole life, even with all their flaws.
There's something off about doing it for profit though. And there's plenty of reporting out there that shows his philanthropy isn't all it's cracked up to be in many cases.
It's also silly to imply that simply doing some philanthropy somehow washes out anything bad you might have done. Often philanthropy is precisely a PR exercise to distract from that stuff.
idk what the ground truth is but what we are talking about here is called "fruit from the poisoned tree" in the field of ethics. This means you get a fruit "good thing" but it was pick from the poison tree "bad thing". And the ethical principle is that's not ethical, because bad thing
Spending $100k to make $1 million isn't philanthropy, it's a very low cost of revenue.
Meanwhile the entire point of "giveaways" and the lotteries he runs is so that children will beg mom and dad to buy them Mr Beast's garbage chocolate for a high price that tastes like ass for a hope that it contains a golden ticket like some sort of Capitalist Evil Willy Wonka.
They make profits with the business, as every single other business in the world. Unlike all other businesses though, they are a business that then funnels a significant chunk to philanthropy. How much has your favorite TV channel given away? Or your favorite book publisher? Or your favorite video game company? Or whatever businesses sell the entertainment you buy?
They certainly tricked a bunch of people into getting free homes, I bet those families are all crying about the fact that the company that gave them a free house makes money by making videos, they must be fuming.
Fallacy of consequentialism. Yes, tons of people got free cataract surgery but that's a band-aid solution to cataract surgery being artificially locked behind a paywall all those people were unable to bypass, and the paywall still exists and is still preventing multiple factors of that group from accessing the same surgery. And wells in the developing world has been a charity money sink for decades at this point, instead of asking "well where's the well you're going to build" why don't you ask "why do so many people all across the world lack clean water?"
And the answer to that question is that it's not profitable to provide clean drinking water to people who can't pay for it. Not that it's not possible, not that it's not a solved engineering problem, clearly it is because some fuckin YouTuber pony's up the cash and suddenly there's a goddamn well. The only reason it's not already there is because we decided someone has to pay for the problem to be solved, and if none of the people who need it solved can afford it, we let them continue drinking dirty water and die from preventable illness because they were born in the wrong income bracket.
And by the same logic, why does Mr. Beast have this money in the first place? Because he's making bullshit videos about """solving""" these problems, because presenting loud, stupid nonsense to a western audience, for free, so they can be showed video ads in the midst of it, is worth enough to pay for these fucking wells.
To make this completely fucking clear: the attention of a western, young audience who's parents have money to spend and may, MIGHT, influence them to buy a product, is worth more than providing clean fucking drinking water to entire villages of people who live in a non-western place, with enough leftover for Mr. Beast to draw a frankly unethical salary for what he's actually doing, and providing to the world. That level of inequity between two groups of people is the grand fucking canyon.
And, to make this other point extra clear, that's not Mr. Beast's fault. He's acting completely rationally within a system that has utterly lost the plot in terms of what actually has value. The fact that unhinged amounts of money are going to a frankly, by all accounts I can find, quite amoral man who has cracked the code for generating loud, obnoxious nonsense that children will consume on an industrial scale so equally morally bankrupt companies can shove advertisements down their eyeballs and convince them to buy shit they don't need, so much so that he can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to make yet more loud, obnoxious bullshit, is the problem. All of this is so completely and thoroughly disentangled from any notion of what anyone actually needs, and the fact that tons of people on this board and elsewhere still manage to call this system the most rational economic system yet discovered while looking at this complete fucking nonsense is astonishing to me.
That's great that you've figured out all the problems of the world, but I was simply answering "what have they done" to a mis-characterization that they are simply time-wasting machines.
They are time wasting machines. YouTube is, and Mr. Beast's production company is by virtue of the fact that it would die immediately if YouTube went away, because nobody would buy that shit in a theater, on a blu ray, or in iTunes Store. Same reason TikTok and it's associated content is also bullshit, literally the only reason anybody watches that garbage is that it's free.
I bet you don't apply this level of rigorous criticism to books or musicians, even though they occupy time that could be better spent curing malaria or arguing about Ukraine on the internet. Why not?
I'd argue it's more than "that it's free", it's that it's tuned to push our buttons. Specifically, it's designed to engage (e.g. generate enragement, outragement, or some similarly powerful emotional response). And the only barrier to getting a hit of this emotional stimulant is a mere click.
I don’t personally want to do that, but I’m still interested in what I can learn about organizational design and culture from their success in their chosen field.
Question is: can this be learned from and applied to other industries which are not focused on extreme growth, such as more traditional industries or B2B work? I’m not sure.
but that's the point... why do you call it "success"
(I mean I get it: they are "good at making money" and "efficient" so you call it a "success" because that's what the capitalist society is pushing you to say / feel without asking yourself deeper questions)
Would you say that "heroin" is a success because it's very good at making people dependant?
You should probably use the term "they are very efficient at what they are doing" (descriptive) rather than "they are successful" (value judgment)
And then you should ask yourself: why are you praising efficiency for the sake of it?
And if you look further at the world, can't you see that efficiency and speed is actually one of our big issues? It's because we're over-efficient that we're consuming so much oil, decimating species, polluting our planet
If we were less efficient, sure we might have less stuff to play with (but who really cares?), but we would not be damaging our world so much
Perhaps you can take a few minutes to think deeply about it, and it might change your definition of "a success"
My definition of the term “success” does not include “I respect and approve of their goals”. I define “success” as “they achieved ambitious goals”, independently of my opinion of those goals.
There are plenty of successful politicians who I disagree with on virtually every issue. I would still classify them as “successful” and I am still interested in understanding how they managed to achieve those goals, despite disliking what they have done with those skills.
After working on a big entertainment time waster social site all week (not so much a crud app) I spent all today running first aid at special Olympics which I think provided value which the crud app let me do. Does that count?
I'm not saying that most devs are helping the world anyhow. But I'm saying that those guys are not either. So we should not be "celebrating their success" as though they did something extraordinary
They just sell shit. Why should we rejoice because they do it efficiently?
that's... my point... Hitler was evidently a bad person, but for their supporter he was great. That's what I'm saying to Simon... why taking such weirdos as figures of "success" when all they do is try to create addiction to shit content
I honestly think these videos are horrible and chasing those engagement metrics is basically the opposite of creating art.
But one thing that did help me gain perspective is a comment that these are literally global products where English is a second language at best. They’re designed to really be the least common denominator.
