I don't think it has anything to do with efficiency, but with effectivity. You could argue producing addictive videos for teens is Mr beasts goal. And he is very effective at doing that. And actually yes, successful at that goal.

Success doesn't really have a moral component, it's relative to the stated goal. You could argue it's not meaningful or moral or worthwhile or valuable, but you can't deny that he has achieved success.

So the thing you can take away from someone like mr beast is "what made them so effective?". A lot of his strategies could be useful for other, more worthwhile goals than his! So there's something that can be learned. I think that's what people mean, not that "people in tech generally value efficiency".

> is BAD, not a "success"

that is your moral view or value. It is not a universal value.

Economic success is indeed a thing, and it can be discussed separately from moralityl.

Not entirely true - bad things can be measured. Harm exists and has a value. The value, in this case if you wanted to derive, would be the amount of money consumers spent on random advertised things.

Sure it would be hard to measure - but you could argue that money is money consumers lost as a result of Mr Beast (or maybe YouTube as a whole).

For example, looking to the tobacco industry: they were incredibly economically successful because they leveraged the weaknesses of the human brain to sell their product, namely nicotine addiction. This is now largely considered immoral, but let's look past that.

We can still measure the badness, or harm, of the tobacco industry objectively. We see how much money was/is spent on cancer treatment, COPD treatment, etc. These analysis have been done before and it's pretty damning, billions of dollars. In some cases, the cost of tobacco straight up exceeds the profit. Meaning, from a communal economic standpoint, they are a net-negative. Yes, it's true, tobacco, while wildly popular, is economically in the red.

Of course, we live in a staunchly capitalistic, individualistic society. Communal economic cost/benefit is almost never looked at. Which is why we had the problems with the tobacco industry, and why the obesity epidemic grows. Mr Beast videos are not of this scale, but I would argue they are of this nature.

No it can't, economic success is completely linked with morality when your success is linked to producing tons of CO2, which is going to put our planet, and in particular poorer people, in the shitters

Yes it can. It's as absurd as claiming you can't talk about a person without mentioning their eventual death.

> but we have to take a step back collectively and understand that "being efficient at producing addictive video for teens to sell ads for shit they don't need" is BAD, not a "success"

That’s seems like a judgement call and a personal one at that. It certainly isn’t a universal value among humanity.

Which is fine, but a 500+ comment HN post where people argue over personal values doesn’t make for interesting reading.

If 100% of his watchers were YouTube Premium subscribers and none of them ever saw an ad, would you feel differently?

If people were actively paying for the content, and thus "accepting to be endoctrinated" why not, although I think that all kind of entreprise with such a handbook of "how to make people basically addicted to the shit we build" is bad

People are losing communities, people are losing attention span, and this is because we make people addict to shit like this

And then idiot like Trump manage to take power

We need a society with longer pauses, reflexion, empathy

It’s still kind if garbage content

> that's clearly because people in tech generally value efficiency

I think this is you reading this into the comment. They don't mention efficiency.