> Lot of people critiquing this, but you can't deny the success.
You could say that about literally any shady business. Imagine seeing a PDF proving tobacco leaders knew for decades that it caused cancer and saying what you did.
Being monetarily successful does not mean you’re good or shouldn’t be criticised.
Ignoring the ethics of Mr Beast, he is producing real videos at an incredibly high volume and they consistently do numbers.
None of those videos is easy to make.
Sure, it's maybe not great to be so impressed by logistics or supply chain of a tobacco company, but from a business and systems view some of it is interesting
"Ignoring the ethics of Mr Beast" — in a discussion on the ethics of Mr Beast.
Sure I get it, probably there are lessons in there ethically good actors could look at and use — but if you find yourself casting away the ethical doubts too easily, you might be in a dangerous spot to begin acting unethical yourself. It is totally possible to learn about the whole system with a morbid fascination while being constantly aware of the ethical implications without casting them aside.
The real question for such an ethics-free look at a business is whether the unethical bits of a business can be really disentangled from the interesting bits in a meaningful way. That is very often not the case.
I don't expect to get a reply given how popular this article and discussion was and given how late I am but ...
What are the ethical considerations here?
The opening reply that kickstarted this particular thread was:
> You could say that about literally any shady business
But that user never bothered to qualify what exactly they consider to be "shady" about Mr. Beast's business.
Other than the fact that he has a hugely successful YouTube channel, I know next to nothing about him. I don't watch his content. From what I gather it is mass appeal entertainment.
I've read in some of the replies that he does philanthropic content and there are some un-cited claims that he "pockets" donations (that would be shady if true, but again - those claims were void of any links that would give them credibility).
Others seem to package-deal him in with all of YouTube creators, and they will cite shitty things that other content creators have done for clout as if Mr. Beast himself (or his company) did those things.
Most of the postings here seem to hate him for being successful at creating YouTube content that they personally don't like.
If you want to convince me that a YouTube channel is unethical, then point me towards the victims. Show me who he is hurting and make a clear case for how he is directly responsible for hurting them.
I found the top level comment to highlight useful ideas.
Operationally, so many people would benefit from understanding bottlenecks, critical components, etc
It feels a little silly to say "a more ethical organization doesn't deal with such things"
If we're here to discuss the links, then it's a little frustrating to have a hundred responses by people who haven't read the doc or are unable to set aside their preconceptions about someone saying things that feel fairly off topic to the top level comment
> but if you find yourself casting away the ethical doubts too easily, you might be in a dangerous spot to begin acting unethical yourself
Oh please. If I start a company and link this doc? Sure, then raise some concerns. If I am reading it and finding interesting operational advice about getting things done or inter team communication, I'm not particularly worried about becoming antisocial or accidentally behaving immorally (perhaps amorally is more apt)
I have got the feeling you are creating a disagreement where there is none. As I said: it is okay to look at how evil-corp is doing things, as long as you can disentangle that from their evil bits, keeping in mind the context within which it was written. That isn't stiff over-moralistic behavior, that is common sense. What isn't usually as okay is going all: "Let's ignore the ethics of $X and don't think about the context within it was written". E.g. a simple bureaucratic rule to collect the religious belief of people might be innocent in some free society, but if the same rule was written in a Nazi-occupied country it gets a completely different meaning. Casting aside the context is like robbing a thing of its meaning. Now just because the Nazis abused that rule doesn't mean other societies elsewhere couldn't use the very same rule in a positive way -- they would just be stupid if they ignored the negative abuses of that rule provided they know of them.
Yes, the context matters a lot. One of the frustrations with this conversation (and this is a thing that happens sometimes and doesn't other times - I don't mean to say this is always a problem on hn) is that we aren't able to discuss the thing because we have to spend the right number of tokens acknowledging globally recognized facts.
I want there to be one comment at the top level saying: hey just in case you're not aware, here's context that you need to know when evaluating a document by Foo.
And then I want the rest of us to be able to discuss it with the understanding that we all have that context.
I agree, but I also think that sometimes looking at the data we have holistically is a good idea.
as the most extreme example; we paid too high a blood cost that shall hpefully never be repeated in civilization again with the Holocaust. But some of the findings in those experiments to have value (I know many of the experiments and findings are worthless from a medical sense). I don't blame anyone at all that takes a moral stance to burn such data in order to discourage any backroom experiments from trying to repeat this, but some of that knowledge was used to save lives.
>The real question for such an ethics-free look at a business is whether the unethical bits of a business can be really disentangled from the interesting bits in a meaningful way. That is very often not the case.
I believe it can. a lot of the advice I read here is just good business sense.
>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.
This sucks to hear as an enthusiast focused on research, but this is honestly just talking about scoping and focusing your goal. very common business sense. But your goal hopefully isn't to shovel out slop with clickbait thumbnails that maximizes engagement.
> This is what dictates what we do for videos... If a viewer feels their expectations are not being matched, they’ll click away - driving down the crucial Average View Duration that informs how much the video is promoted by YouTube’s all-important mystical algorithms.
This is about making an engaging hook. Again, good business sense you'll hear launching any product.
This is definitely for clickbait (and the interpretation here focusing on AVD over quality can be scrutinized), but you can balance this and make a good hook without outright lying.
>An example of the “wow factor” would be our 100 days in the circle video.... we bring it in on a crane 30 seconds into the video. Why? Because who the fuck else on Youtube can do that lol.
crude language, but they understand the competition, and what they can and can't do. Ideally the lesson you get here isn't to just "outspend your competition", but that you need to understand your strengths and highlight them. Mr. Beast mindhacked the algorithms early on and uses those funds to do stuff others don't have the Net Worth to even attempt.
etc. It's possible, as long as you keep a moral compass in mind while understanding the undertones of the advise.
I don’t know if they’re necessarily two different conversations - there’s a conversation to be had whether the business practices discussed would have been effective in an ethical operation.
It’s entirely possible the success has nothing to do with the business principles and 100% the ethics. Same the other way around, or anywhere in between.
1. morals drive ethics, so no point separating the two.
2. ethics is not some ettiquite decided in a business room. they are formed by society. It was probably never ethical to let kids work in coal mines, but as long as it wasn't illegal (and can take the PR hit) some businesses would just do it.
Ok. I'll bite. Ethics is one aspect of humans that allowed us to survive the jungle and move beyond it.
I take your comment as a joke, but have come to the depressing conclusion that too many impressionable people will not understand it that way. They will think it some nugget of wisdom to revert to being a rat in a jungle.
This is apparently an unpopular idea but you're right: human nature is based on cooperation. Even under "free market" systems people do things that are not optimal market decisions because they are naturally predisposed to helping other people, even when it is often exploited. A lot of marketing deliberately exploits this, e.g. the common tactic of "giving something for free" to make the consumer feel like they owe a favor, or giving products a cutesy persona so consumers anthropomorphize the product and their interactions with it instead of seeing it as a disposable tool.
We come into this world naked, defenseless, starving and freezing. Other animals are able to defend themselves or at least flee, often only minutes after being born or hatching. It takes literal months for us to learn to meaningfully move on our own, about a year to feed ourselves and many more years to be able to pose a meaningful threat to natural predators or forage for food on our own. Throughout this entire time we not only need to be nurtured by our parents, we need an entire society to sustain us and our caregivers.
This is a common misunderstanding of our evolution: it's not simply our brains that gave us an edge over the rest of the animal kingdom, it's our cooperation. Large brains are a natural consequence of complex social interactions and feed back into them. It's not just the ability to make and use tools that set us apart, it's our ability to teach each other about them and learn from each other.
It didn't take a great individual inventor, it took a tribe full of people to carry on each invention and pass the knowledge to the next generation while sustaining the tribe to allow the inventors to invent new technology or improve upon old ones for the benefit of the entire tribe. We're not standing on the shoulders of giants, we're standing on a human pyramid of all who came before us and everyone around us helping to perpetuate humanity.
Please indulge my hypothetical situation: there is a company that produces many very expensive videos every week and make a lot of money from each one.
Every single video they make is a hit.
In this hypothetical situation, I would be impressed that this organization is able to deliver such consistent product. I would be curious about what they do or say operationally that enables that.
At the end of the podcast the filmcast, they say "at the end of the day, it is really impressive that _ made a movie." (They name the director)
This is true if the director has made dozens of movies or one. It's always impressive. Doing things in the real world is hard.
Do you find anything in this hypothetical situation agreeable? Or is it only hard when someone you like does it?
Ethics only exist to provide value. If you can’t point to a value that your ethics provide then it’s not needed and excessive. Most of the ethical standards do provide value or mitigate risk you just need to understand what that risk and value trades is.
This is the line of reasoning phone scammers used whenever kitboga (a scam baiter) revealed his identity and asked them why they did this job instead of something better. One of them asked him "oh, so you are a saint, and you never did anything wrong?"
It's absurd to attempt to equate two actions completely out of their context to claim that "everyone is unethical sometimes ".
Ethics is no binary. You ethics are not mine and everybody does questionable actions from time to time. A company is an entity with potentially thousands people, one of them doing questionable things will happen.
Some legal entities are acting all the time in a way we would lock them up in psych ward if they were a natural person. That might be a good way to "succeed" but that's probably something the society shouldn't promote/foster.
In the real world it's not only revenue and profits. That's for sure taking most of the space but people behind the entities are caring about other stuff and takes non-profit-optimal decisions all the time.
Sbf is just an example of people who failed. Contrary, Musk or Sackler family are good examples of people who succeeded. Do you want to talk about their questionable ethics and how it made them extremely rich?
Games Workshop, multi-billion pound publicly traded British company. Manufacture their core goods in British factories, don’t engage in tax shenanigans.
I am from far enough back in time (started with 1st edition and then went to 2nd - and had almost all of the codexes, even though I only played a single faction/army) I would buy codexes (army books) for all the armies, because I liked the art and the lore.
The 2nd edition box set was about ~£35 in 1993, adjusted for inflation that would be ~£73 now - which then when converted into CAD is well...alot more than what I just paid for 10th edition (about $80 CAD+tax). So - it's a good deal - and I am sure that there is overlap amongst friends during edition changeover.
5-year cycle would be a happy medium, but "that's just like my opinion man"...
> There is no ethics in business, only revenue and profits.
Ethics affect everything we do. If you are doing something deeply unethical, you have way more difficult time finding good employees, for example. Because people don't want to work for scumbags. And the people you find, are likely also unethical and care only about money, how do you think that is going to play out in the long run?
Business and ethics are inseparable. You have to understand ethics to be able to make money - not meaning that you need to be ethical.
I guess people are taking this comment as supporting unethical business, but in fact what he's saying applies to capitalism in general, and why capitalism is unethical. Pretty much every big company did and is doing unethical things, but for most people it doesn't matter because they're "successful". If you equate amounts of money with success, as our system does, then it is pretty much guaranteed that people will do unethical things to reach "success", i.e., X amounts of dollars.
I would be genuinely curious to hear: in your mind, could any system be interesting to you, no matter its ethical basis? Or is there a line, and if so, what is the line to you?
Agree and I’ll take it a step further: shouldn’t we encourage deep understanding of malicious or unethical systems so we can know how they work and possibly thwart them?
A big folly in political movements is completely disregarding their opponents rhetoric. Studying it and discussing it is not the same as validating it. You can't effectively fight what you don't understand and you can't understand something you refuse to know.
Mr Beast’s “youtube success hacking”, or whatever you want to call it, excels in the most obvious of ways: use hyperbole all of the time and use extreme and borderline misanthropic interpersonal interaction to achieve goals.
I don’t think either of these activities would surprise anyone at achieving success in _some_ form, despite how manipulative and sociopathic they are. What exactly is to be learned here? Where is the deep understanding?
People click on things that are hyperbolic. When people are threatened with losing their jobs unless they perform at an extremely high level, they will work to the best of their ability to achieve that level, at the expense of practically everything else they value in their lives. None of this is new or novel.
Most people avoid employing these structures because they’re viciously misanthropic and cynical. Some, of course, do, but I don’t see us using that information to ignore them or prevent them from existing. I just see them lauded for “thinking outside the box” on Hacker News.
What’s interesting about this conversation is the different perspectives on the material, not necessarily the material itself. Nothing I read in the document reads like “use hyperbole all the time” or “extreme and borderline misanthropic interpersonal interaction”. Instead most of it reads like the sort of things you’d expect to see in any high paced, high competition industry, just written for the sort of people that grew up in and would work at a YouTube company vs folks that grew up in and would work for a major manufacturer. Every company, whether explicitly said or not distinguishes between employees who are excited to be there and excited to be working on the company goals and the ones who are just there to punch a clock. And at every company the clock punchers have always been held in lower regard than the excited employees. We can worry about how that tendency can lead to worker exploitation (see also the game development industry), but the reality is any time you get a group of people together, the folks who have a vision and a mission are going to be more drawn to and get along better with the people who share a passion for that vision and mission.
Maybe the misalignment is one of misunderstanding - we don’t make it explicit that sharing something like this isn’t to celebrate it.
I don’t catch any major celebrations of abusive tactics on HN, but then again I tend to be late to the comments and those posts are buried by the time I arrive.
Let me ask that question a different way: let’s say what you learn had no value or it was something that was already pretty well understood (such as the fact that people click misleading or hyperbolic links). What was the value to society in that information being created or shared?
Man, this is overwrought. We're just talking about a YouTuber here for Christ's sakes. He makes silly videos of competitions with admittedly grueling conditions for entertainment, but people sign up for it voluntarily and they can leave at any time. This is not a serious ethical quandary.
So you feel the person who is doing this competition doesn’t feel like they actually need the money in their lives? Or do you think there might be a power imbalance around financial stability being exploited?
I bet if you asked those people who were winning those life-changing amounts of money, they would say they felt the opposite of exploited.
Again, more overwrought language. People are doing this out of their own free will, and benefiting substantially from it. If you truly care about people being exploited in uneven financial situations, you would do well to put all your effort towards enacting a higher minimum wage, removing part-time and contractor classification for all low-paying jobs, etc. Because complaining about fun YouTube videos paying people six figures for not all that much time ain't it. And if you really think that people who don't have lots of money can never consent to doing anything, well god isn't that a paternalistic approach that infantilizes adults.
The fact that I find the first chapter of When We Cease to Understand the World (the world war 1 bit) to be breathtaking/haunting maybe tells you everything you need to know
Ignoring the ethics of Mexican drug cartels, they are producing some crucial and consistently demanded products. Like high-volume of drugs and violence that rivals the state.
None of those are easy to achieve.
Sure, it's maybe not great to be impressed by the logistics of a militarized drug cartel, but from a business and systems view it's quite interesting. /sarcasm
This is literally cocaine logic, i.e. because I feel good when taking cocaine, it's good for me. Ergo, cocaine is good.
what if you study Mexican drug cartels, and you find that they have a certain method of communication that enables them to communicate more efficiently.
You copy this communication in your non-profit organization that feeds starving children and find that you are able to feed 50% more children when communicating with this more efficient method.
This is not "literally cocaine logic", it's learning from others.
To use an example you'll probably agree with more: You can hate the lyrics of a given musical artist but copy their production style and in doing so give your lyrics a better platform from which to be heard.
Methods != end goals
You can adapt effective methods currently used to accomplish questionable things to accomplish more noble things.
although, to be perfectly honest, I doubt you'd learn much from Mexican drug cartels that would apply to software, as the markets are completely different.
Ok, but the methods (hustle, grind-culture, high pressure on marks) are here just as questionable as the end goals (Be the biggest Youtuber).
What can you learn from Mr. Beast? Nothing that a lack of conscience and some basic psychology of engagement couldn't teach you.
To reuse your analogy, what if you could communicate information by arranging the corpses of your enemies in a certain pattern, then use international news reports to get the messages across.
What could this teach us about communication? Nothing.
We learn that they operate on a culture of radical accountability. They are also a pressure cooker organization that micro manages hard and expects employees to pull all nighters
There are probably business ethics in the cartels as well. They have different core values and risk profiles than conventional businesses but there are likely business operating guidelines and operational ground rules that we can ethics.
I think the ethics are important when you're looking not just at Mr Beast's businesses themselves but also their internal culture, especially when squaring it up against the perception of himself he's created as some sort of squeaky clean philanthropic billionaire, particularly among his primarily young fans. Those big charity videos aren't done altruistically, they serve another purpose of deflecting criticism.
You have the façade presented to the public, then the operations of the businesses he runs, then the culture built within them. If you ignore the ethics then you won't see that a significant part of his success is in his PR muscle, and how (young) people then expect that follows through to working for him or going on his show.
I don't doubt that this isn't unlike the dream of going to work in the games industry as a kid, getting to make the very kind of game you loved to play, only to realise that what's on the inside is actually pretty ugly, and perhaps your fanaticism has been exploited.
Honestly to this day, I don't know what he did wrong, it seems like a concerted effort to take him down and/or grifters want to profit from his downfall by 'exposing' him.
The allegiations seems to have been:
- His shows are scripted to varying degrees - I think this should be obvious to anyone old enough to not think santa's real.
- Some of his friends/production staff did some bad stuff (I won't elaborate). These people are not MrBeast, but sovereign individuals. Production staff in the movie industry rotates at a weekly rate.
- His productions are a shitshow, with tons of stress overtime, last minute heroic saves etc. - If you've read/watched anything Adam Savage has written, you'll realise unfortunately the entire film industry is like this, with everything being on a tight timeline. Practical sets often can be set up once and get destroyed during filming. If somebody messes up, it's often weeks of work and millions of dollars down the drain.
>- His shows are scripted to varying degrees - I think this should be obvious to >anyone old enough to not think santa's real.
Anyone who watches 99% of media should not find scripting to be a surprise. And many posting here on HN, who have given technical talks and presentations definitely do some level of preparation/script in advance. You can tell which people on YouTube/TikTok/etc actually prepare and have a script - against those who just ramble on with absolutely no plan outside of "this is a cool thing I like, that I want to talk about for far too long". (I watch alot of DIY/maker style videos)
Because - even if it is "unscripted" - there are soooo many hours of footage required to cut together even a short news interview segment. Many many years ago, I was interviewed for a short (5m) segment on "wardriving". The camera crew and interviewer took more than 8 hours to get all of their footage/angles and my various sound-bites for 5 minutes of aired footage. (And who knows how long in the edit room) It was eye-opening for me.
- Exploiting his employees to a degree that could be considered torture (Yes, we need to keep you awake in solitary confinement for the time-lapse video)
- Hiring Delaware a known Sex Offender, and not keeping him away from children.
> I think this should be obvious to anyone old enough to not think santa's real.
Some people assumed the story is real, and knowing it is fake lessens the impact of his contests and story arcs in his videos (Mac's trials hit different when you realize it's scripted).
But also perhaps not conflating “success” with morally positive outcomes.
Being efficient at destroying the planet is to successfully destroy the planet.
I think the original point was precisely to separate the concepts that make something successful - to be successful at what you do - from a judgement on the outcomes - the thing that you are doing.
> But also perhaps not conflating “success” with morally positive outcomes.
The reason why I would conflate them is that success had a positive social implication. You get respect if you're successful. In order to separate these concept, I'd use language that doesn't have positive connotations. "Efficient" is more than accurate.
The scope of “success” under examination in this guide is tailored for an artificial economic organism that wants to survive and capitalize in a particular competitive marketplace (YouTube).
It is almost certainly not generalizable advice for achieving “success” in the cooperative game of life on earth.
That's probably why we need some morals to come in and balance stuff. You want quick and easy money, you run drugs or sell your body. I'm sure you can be very successful in both if you optimize to be successful in those ventures.
But those are not only societally looked down upon but illegal is most US states. Your success here also lies on the ability to operate discreetly out of the eyes of the law. Would that be a success? (even if I personally believe they should be legal).
"Success" is to achieve the intended goal, without causing new problems that outweigh the benefit of reaching that goal.
Reaching the goal is not a moral measurement, it is all about efficiency. If you don't reach the goal, your efficiency is zero.
The moral question is what new problems are acceptable. That's where reasonable people can disagree.
success without morals is exactly how we got into this age of enshittification. We got customers on lock, easy "success" to make a Big Mac $8 and mine data from an app, or retroactively increase our subscriptions from $10 to $20/month.
Maybe we should integrate that social value into "success" more often. Facebook was probably the most successful company, so successful laws are being made to reel their patterns in. It wasn't illegal before though, so success?
> If anything we need to go slower and gentler (environmentally, socially, economically), not "faster"
Do you think we should move slower when it comes to saving the planet? From what I can tell your main issue is with the goal, not with efficiency itself.
> Being efficient at destroying the planet is NOT success
For some businesses being efficient means there is a side-effect of destroying the planet. For others it's causing customers/employees long-term health effects like cancer. Many industries that are considered highly profitable have these types of things -- think pharmaceuticals (legal or not), lending, gambling.
"Success" in a business generally means being profitable. Usually this requires being "efficient" but being efficient isn't the goal. Neither is "Net good for society/humanity at large" -- at least not the main one, taking priority over being profitable.
well maybe they should. That's why we have so much reguation. And why instead of following regulation they lobby to remove such restrictions.
Can I really say a company lobbying for worse people/worker/world conditions to be a "success"? The cigarette metaphor is apt here. if you wanna go more extreme, children in mines would be the best success; employees who can't talk back, can be paid peanuts, and are easily replacable is peak success.
I wasn't sure how MrBeast can "set viewers' expectations" so efficiently and mine so many minds with this formula until I recently witnessed a friend's children log into their YouTube Kids account and immediately be suggested a selection of choice MrBeast cuts. The six-year-old had the remote and went for several inane MrBeast videos in close succession but his older sibling was not impressed. But the bottom line is, children are involved in the equation, and in terms of interest in his customers' minds he is getting close to being the anti-Mister Rogers.
Imagine that our bitter enemies invented a superior logistics tool, known as the wheel. Should we even consider adopting it, given its clearly ethically unacceptable origins?
If you think that this is an entirely artificial example, consider the fact that the same man designed the V-2 rockets which were hitting London during WWII, and the Saturn-5 rockets which brought astronauts to Moon: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun
Imagine that our bitter ememies invented a superior logistics tool, known as the wheel. They also invented airplanes and the concept of blitzkrieg. Should we attribute their success to the wheel, and study how it was designed, since they clearly had a mighty army?
I think the idea being debated here is that it’s impossible to know whether the business practices would work without the lack of ethics. It might not be a good case study or a direction you want people going in as it might put them in some of the ethically compromising positions, or even worse require people to put themselves in those positions to work
> Imagine that our bitter ememies invented a superior logistics tool, known as the wheel. They also invented airplanes and the concept of blitzkrieg. Should we attribute their success to the wheel, and study how it was designed, since they clearly had a mighty army?
If you replace "wheel" with "jerrycan", then that's exactly what happened.
> Such was the appreciation of the cans in the war effort that President Franklin Roosevelt noted, "Without these cans it would have been impossible for our armies to cut their way across France at a lightning pace which exceeded the German Blitzkrieg of 1940."
If we're going this way, the next question - and a real one, this time - is whether we should study and use the medical data they acquired doing very unethical things to prisoners.
I’m not going to pretend to have an answer to that question, it’s above my pay grade.
But I would be comfortable pushing back on the idea that we should structure and operate our medical clinics like theirs because they made scientific breakthroughs.
It's above my paygrade too, but what I remember from occasional discussions of that case is that:
- The obvious take is, the evil deed's already been done, the knowledge it produced can save lives and can't realistically be re-gathered any other way, so why not use it?
- The counter to that is, using it legitimizes and encourages similar acts in the future.
(Personally, I can see the encouragement angle; disagree with legitimization.)
- There's often a side thread going on about how the atrocities and those who committed them were not Up To Scientific Standards, therefore all their data is invalid, so there's no reason to use it anyway.
(Personally, I think this is a lame cop-out, used when one feels the ethical argument is too weak to stand on its own.)
Something to note here is that most (if not all) of the "medical data" acquired by Axis experiments is useless: a lot of it is on the order of "if we make someone really cold they die". The methodology was, unsurprisingly, generally biased, non-reproducible, and often cruel for the sake of it, rather than unethical out of necessity.
IMO there's a nice parallel between useless evidence from bad experiments, and useless business practices from unethical companies. If you want to take the lessons but leave the bad stuff, often you'll find there's nothing left.
> Imagine that our bitter enemies invented a superior logistics tool
Imagine instead that narrow, shallow, obsessed people (NSOBs) built a superior Banality Machine for absorbing the time and attention of suckers. The more suckers who watch, the more revenue earned by NSOB Inc.
> Should we even consider adopting it, given its clearly ethically unacceptable origins?
The problem is not the inventor but the invention itself. In your quite inept analogy, the wheel itself is somehow unethical. IE, they didn't invent the wheel they invented the slave.
Also notable: the first was accomplished under a fascist government intent on violent world domination, and the latter was completed under a (arguably less fascist, depending on exact time frame) different government, specifically because in the meantime there was a large scale critique of the people running the aforementioned initial government by (roughly) the rest of the world.
So I believe your point leads to the conclusion that critiques at this time of the ruling authorities within this company might lead to a reorganization of control, such as might best position any further advancements to benefit a wider population in more pro social ways.
(von Braun being a clear “A-Player”, not a CEO, given the terminology at hand)
"Exploit" (mostly) only has a negative connotation in the context of people; if you exploit a resource or an opportunity, it seldom gets seen the same way.
Because of the latter, businesses leaders can also quite often talk about the former without even noticing that normal people regard "exploiting people" as a bad thing.
Sometimes it's hard to even agree what counts as exploitation of a person: The profit margin of every successful employer I've ever had is, in some sense, them exploiting me — but I've also worked in places where that's negative, loss-making, and the investors paid for my time with the profits made from others, which feels to me like the successes I've been involved with paying for the failures, not exploitation.
> You can pick almost any major company and find some way they exploit someone else.
Correction, you can pick any extremely large corporation.
Very large (i.e. successful) exploit people by design. Businesses not willing to exploit people are at a disadvantage and can never be as successful as those that are willing to exploit others.
The richest business in history was the Dutch East India Company. The richest below them are the Mississippi Company, rounding it out with the South Sea Company. Within the top 10 includes oil companies, who exploit our future for profit, and Big Tech, who exploit us for profit. Is it any surprise most of the richest companies in history exploited human capital for massive gains?
Exploitation and profit are the same concept just different framing. The distinction between shady and non is usually more about who is being exploited, to what extent they're being exploited and how transparent the business is about that exploitation.
And Mr Beast dangles a fortune in front of one of his employees that grew up in poverty to pressure them into staying in a room for 100 days with all the lights on. Guess it's all the same though.
You're dramatically overestimating the profitability of selling groceries. Most of the high prices come from further up the supply chain, or other parts of the local economies like rent, utilities, transportation, and labor. Obviously some stores are better than others, but if some company is just milking people in any given grocery market, competitors will show up in a second to take their customers away. Even in food deserts served only by expensive bodegas and the like— selling fresh food at low volumes is fucking expensive because of how much waste you have, and beyond that, your street corner retail space is a whole lot more expensive per food item than a grocery store on the edge of town.
Australia has two major grocery chains who stockpile vacant land to remain monopolistic. The supermarkets screw suppliers on price and will dump them entirely if they speak out. They also produce their own ‘home brands’ which undercut competitors as they own the entire supply chain. You can be damn sure it’s happening here.
Edit: and whether it happens or not, my question was related to whether mr beast dangling a million dollars for someone to stand in a circle for 100 days is as unethical as price gouging essential items. One may take advantage of a few people and is probably not extremely biased towards the most vulnerable, (e.g. the participants are probably not homeless), the other is taking advantage of everyone, homelessness is surging in aus atm. I see Mr beasts videos as far less damaging than the current problem in Australia.
Not all shady business practices are gouging. I was responding to the statement you made. Selling a product cheaper than your competitors, even if you're using unfair leverage to do it is not by any measure 'gouging.' In the US, discount stores are most likely to play the "strategically let this useful land moulder in a densely populated area during a housing crisis" game but they're definitely not price gouging. Those are problems with business ethics, and I do not consider them more harmful, generally, than lampooning poor people to an audience of millions. The stigma of poverty and houselessness has direct, consequential economic and mental health impact on the people that experience it.
Australian supermarkets are screwing producers by making lowball offers on stock and increasing prices far beyond inflation to consumers. They are both price gouging and performing other shady business practices at the same time.
Ok, so one of those things is price gouging (the price gouging), which sounds like a problem local to the Australian grocery market. It's obviously bad, but Mr Beast has 12x Australia's population in YouTube followers. The comparison doesn't make sense. Your trying to whatabout this with that is completely bizarre, and why your initial comment is dead. Bye
I’m not sure how his follower count is relevant unless he’s paying all his followers to stand in a circle. But sure, keep thinking mr beast is the most unethical entity in the world while we all suffer the consequences of late stage capitalism.
Come on... you know I never even intimated that Mr. Beast is the most unethical entity in the world. Saying that viewership doesn't matter when you've turned degrading poor people into a form of entertainment is obviously a bad faith argument. Now, for real, I'll leave you to destroy every straw man you can fabricate, by yourself.
Nah, you have the wrong idea completely, non-shady businesses provide a good or service, that you can't obtain (easily) yourself. Period, non-stop. (Ignoring for a minute monopolies, which can actually be quite fair but usually aren't unless heavily regulated.)
If you have infinite time, resources, patience, sure, you might be able to provide the same thing for yourself, but not everyone has a farm, not everyone has the time or ability to visit Grandma...
Shady businesses try to sell you gum while on your call to Grandma (nothing to do with calling grandma, just a "value-added" thing).
I'd also posit, if you don't know the difference, you're probably being exploited yourself. I'd take a hard look at who you are giving money to, and try re-evaluate if they are providing you value or not (with respect to your circumstances).
I wouldn't call it that, but I think the term does get used in that way: any profit due to my skills is my labour being "exploited" in some sense. (Not one I am upset by).
The terminological disagreement makes it easier to miss abusive exploitation.
I don't think "exploitation" is the right word to use for every business transaction.
When there's choice/competition and transparency/information (i.e. not some form of advanced psychological manipulation going on that can be impossible to economically avoid for many), who's being exploited?
"Profit" means you're overpaying (i.e. the amount of money you exchange for goods or services exceeds the cost of providing them). Failure to operate at a profit (even if it may be indirect in cases like VC-funded disruptors undercutting established competitors for early growth) means the business will fail.
Business transactions are exploitative. That's the entire point of them. Otherwise it'd just be tit-for-tat or a gift economy. You don't want to recover your investment, you want to grow your investment. And beating inflation is the baseline.
I'd probably agree that it makes sense to try to find a synonym where possible, but I wouldn't say it's necessary in cases where it would not be succinct or clear otherwise.
We're speaking English in this conversation, not Latin or French. The word "exploit" clearly has a significantly negative connotation that is not appropriate in this context.
The grocery store doesn't exploit my inability to grow food, it enables me to do something more productive with my time instead of growing food and leaving that part of society to the experts. Food surplus and specialization are vital concepts to any advanced society.
I don't want someone to think that i'm blaming someone for reading stuff. I just think and see that sometimes for people it is very easy to forget or miss bad things (harm to society) when their salary (or income) depends on ignoring this.
>Imagine seeing a PDF proving tobacco leaders knew for decades that it caused cancer and saying what you did.
The difference is the game he's playing (youtube) is similar to the game we're playing (startups) so the success is tantamount.
The game tobacco companies play is also very different, so the tobacco companies success will teach you very little about being successful in startups.
Personally the game I’m playing (building an effective edtech company) is probably less similar to the game he is playing (running illegal lotteries targeted at children) than the game Tabacco companies play (lean heavily on branding, marketing, and trying to control the academic narrative).
Heck yes, Marvel films, any big Hollywood films, are shady. HN is basically a vanity project so it's less shady. If HN was "optimized for engagement" the way a MrBeast video or Marvel film is, I bet I'm not the only one who would be out of here.
hn is not optimized (thank good) and didn’t change in forever. There is also no monetizing, it doesn’t have ads nor subscription, and if it were more popular it would be more expensive to host.
Instead look at reddit is desperately trying (inline ads, chat, avatars, forcing app use)
> There is also no monetizing, it doesn’t have ads nor subscription...
This is false. HN is hosted by YC, and as such promotes YC ventures. On the front page right now is the following link (with disallowed comments and upvotes):
Why is Marvel shady? Because they produce and market films that a lot of people enjoy?
I mean personally I mostly enjoyed Marvel until they started multiverse crap. And they made way too many TV shows that were all terrible. So I stopped watching.
Marvel can produce so much stuff because they overwork and underpay employees like VFX artists and writers. Then those movies/shows don't do so well, so they lower the budget of the next one, and it devolves into what it is now.
I'm not into the Marvel universe (obviously) but it seemed to me they had been doing multiversey stuff for a long time, so I looked it up. They've done it since the 60s. They have also done endless reboots and endless retcons.
In short, they've milked every bit of nostalgia you may have for their characters, I mean their properties, as long as humanly possible and then some.
I don't even have any nostalgia for these characters. They were a really fringe phenomenon in my country. But do you think that means we don't get the 20+ Marvel movies shoved down our throats? Oooh, no. We'll eat what we're served, or not go to the movies at all (that's the option I choose). If you wanted to make a parody of hamfisted, audience-contemptous cultural imperialism, you couldn't do better than Marvelwood.
> they've milked every bit of nostalgia you may have for their characters
No, it's not nostalgia. Marvel Film's greatest achievement is they took C and D tier characters and made them A tier. Iron Man was not super popular prior to the films. No one had even heard of Guardians of the Galaxy. Prior to the Marvel Cinematic Universe the most popular Marvel characters were Spider-Man and X-men. The film rights of whom had been previously sold to Sony and Fox.
In any case, I don't see how any of this makes them "shady". Not entertaining? Maybe. Shady? I honestly don't even know what that means in this context. Superhero movies strike me as extremely low on the scale of evil. Making mass market entertainment? Oh no the horror! /s
Marvel films, which (like much of big budget Hollywood at this point sadly) at this point are infamous for their exploitation of cheap unorganized effects artists, are probably a bad example for something being "not shady".
HN actually discourages high engagement by having the front page items change fairly slowly (rather than algorithmically customizing them to each user), not making scrolling beyond that (i.e. pagination and the "latest" feed) any less awkward to navigate than it has been forever and actively preventing you from commenting too much within a given timeframe (which it doesn't actively disclose when you hit the limit). That's probably a bad example for something being "shady".
> Can you point to the parts of the document, or other resources about Mr. Beast,
> that warrant a comparison with tobacco companies?
The part where the GP says "Lot of people critiquing this, but you can't deny the success." invites counterexamples of companies that are successful but still deserving of critique.
They make money in ways that others would find morally reprehensible. The tobacco industry makes its money off of addictive substances that kill millions per year, and Donaldson makes content for entertainment that literally tortures people in the sense of being a violation of the geneva convention. In both cases they're highly efficient operations that make a lot of money, but whether or not you would call it a success story depends on your definition of success. If your definition of successful is "makes money", then the tobacco industry, Donaldson, fentanyl dealers, etc are indeed successful. If your definition is "the world is a better place for its existence", then not so much.
Regarding sources: if you're genuinely interested and not just being argumentative for argument's sake, you're capable of googling "MrBeast geneva convention" and following the sources from there.
>and Donaldson makes content for entertainment that literally tortures people in the sense of being a violation of the geneva convention
What specific acts are we talking about? "violation of the geneva convention" could mean literally anything between "putting red cross symbols on soldiers" and "summarily executing civilians", so it doesn't really narrow things down. If they're being put in uncomfortable positions, but they're not risking long term harm and it's voluntary, I don't see what the issue is.
You could say that about literally any shady business. Imagine seeing a PDF proving tobacco leaders knew for decades that it caused cancer and saying what you did.
Being monetarily successful does not mean you’re good or shouldn’t be criticised.