> His $750-million company got that way entirely by exploiting people’s misery for views and profit
Uh, what? The guy runs big elaborate game shows. The contestants are thrilled for the chance to compete to win money. How could you spin that as exploiting people's misery?
You're conflating different categories of his videos. Competition videos like Squid Game have volunteers who are participating willingly, with a few winners. And charity videos like "cure 1000 cataracts" also have willing participants, who all get surgery for free, no competition involved.
There are no Mr Beast videos where "miserable" people compete to get charity prizes.
> Who wouldn't want to live and work in that world?
Who would want to? There are a lot of jobs in the real world that do work this way, and they are generally not the most desirable jobs. E.g. data entry or picking fruit or customer support or working on an assembly line.
The ability to improve, scale your work, and over time make a bigger impact with less effort is one of the key things that makes any kind of work interesting.
Not to mention a lot of the the most desirable jobs, like, say, professional athlete or movie star, tend to work very differently than what you're describing. Many people work very hard in those fields and never succeed, it's the combination of hard work and skill and a little bit of luck/randomness that makes it interesting.
In the real world, there's no amount of work that someone employed in data entry or fruit picking etc. can do that will give them the wealth, lifestyle or prestige of the CEO that runs their company. There are no idle rich in Animal Crossing. Even Tom Nook is always working, and it doesn't seem like he generates excess profits from his businesses.
> Before, mods could run subreddits as they saw fit, users could choose the subreddits they participated in, and a user can always create a new subreddit if they don't think any existing ones suit their needs.
As a frequent Reddit user I don't agree with that. The network effects of subreddits plus the fact that they usually own the default name for a topic grant a lot of subs effective monopolies.
As a user if I don't like something about a certain subreddit including how it's moderated, the more realistic option is just to not participate in that subject matter on Reddit. I can still use Reddit for other topics but I feel like there's very rarely an alternative subreddit on the same topic which is anywhere near as active as the main one.
So, no offense to Reddit mods, but I really don't think these are all highly skilled, irreplaceable individuals. There's no competition that incentivizes the best people to rise to the top, these are just average folks that volunteered at the right time and now they're mods. There is apparently even a lot of cronyism among the mod community and I have heard that it can be hard to break into for first time mods.
If Reddit forces some of them out, there will be many people willing to step in who can do just as good of a job. It might even be a net positive thing to get new people involved.
> The network effects of subreddits plus the fact that they usually own the default name for a topic grant a lot of subs effective monopolies.
That's often the case, but not always. A bad mod can drive people to an alternate subs. And having the default name doesn't mean that a sub with an alternate name can't thrive. I enjoy r/marijuanaenthusiasts despite the fact that I've never smoked.
I agree with all of that, but honestly the more important factor is this is just not a very good cause to get all worked up about. Reddit is trying to grow into a profitable company, their business model is showing ads to users, they obviously can't just let millions of people use 3rd party apps for free.
I think even casual users understand this perfectly well. They don't use 3rd party apps for browsing Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or Tiktok (because those services also don't offer APIs). Why should Reddit be different?
Reddit is different because it has been different. Not everything needs to conform prior social media models.
I think the cause is totally fine. I think framing it as some social justice cause is incorrect though. People really liked a thing and now reddit is taking it away in the name of money. The most downvoted post of all time on reddit is an EA post responding to monetization concerns in a star wars game. Seems right in line to me.
Interesting, at what viewing distance is a 4k monitor 70 PPD?
From what I've seen the common advice for monitors is that 5k is the ideal resolution for a 27" screen and 4k is a little bit less sharp if you're looking closely.
That's why I'm curious just how good the resolution can be on the Vision Pro. If it takes a 5k monitor at, say, 2ft away which covers maybe 30 degrees of your field of view vertically to be truly "retina", then surely a 4k display 3 inches away from your eye that covers ~120 degrees of your field of view is not quite there.
But you also have lenses that are stretching out the screen to cover your periphery where it can be much less sharp so it's not exactly comparable.
I have a really hard time believing this is being actively driven by collusion among rich families who know they could game non-SAT metrics. It would require a huge organizational effort, and for what? It's still not going to be a sure thing to get their kids in, there's gonna be even more randomness in the process after this change than there is now. And sending your kids to elite an school doesn't even buy them that much anyway if you're already rich & influential, you can pull strings to get them a job after they graduate from a mediocre school.
It's much easier to believe that this is being driven by college administrators who know that the way to advance their careers in the current climate is by passing radical social justice changes, and this particular idea is simply an organically popular fad among social justice influencers so it's the one they've latched onto.
I just can't take any discussion of "skills" seriously that equates skill to some formal certification or degree.
As a software engineer, basically all the skills I use to do my job on a day to day basis are things I've learned from experience, or informal mentorship from other engineers, or reading blog posts on programming practices and then applying those things and seeing what works and what doesn't.
But to an economist none of this counts. A 24 year old that just started their first job after getting a masters degree in CS is considered objectively more skilled than someone with an undergrad degree and 10 years of experience.
To be fair, technical skills training in the UK is currently mostly delivered through apprenticeships. The model is 80% "on the job", 20% "off the job" training. So, in theory at least, they should deliver the kind of experience and informal mentorship you're talking about, alongside classroom based training (which is supposed to cover fundamentals, theory, etc.).
In practice, how well this works depends on how effectively employer and training provider coordinate, and how committed the employer is to delivering on the mentorship part.
Economists have a habit of abusing data. It's seen as preferable to simplify the system enough to test a hypothesis than to acknowledge that the system is too complex to analyze. A little too much physics influence and not enough engineering.
I would think that software engineering is the exception that proves the rule: people with domain knowledge are highly motivated to share what they know, ask questions, consolidate knowledge, and refine processes using the Internet.
Working in another field (public services might be a good example) it’s often not possible to test out hypothetical solutions, or find relevant expertise, or to even discover that whole areas of knowledge actually exist. In that context, relevant qualifications have a little more weight.
You can go onto youtube and find dozens if not hundreds of people wanting to share their expertise with the world on every subject you could possibly imagine. "Qualifications" are just the result of a lobbying effort from those already in the industry to restrict supply in order to increase the rates they can charge.
> I would think that software engineering is the exception that proves the rule: people with domain knowledge are highly motivated to share what they know, ask questions, consolidate knowledge, and refine processes using the Internet.
Not my experience they don't want these people on the Netherlands not with my skin colour I guess.
For me it's about being given dedicated time and space to actually upskill - sure in house training is (the most?) important, but what about developing new skills that no one in your company already has? Reading blog posts is all well and good as a software engineer but for many roles this is not an option as there might not be high quality content publicly available online.
very much this. i am applying for a workvisa, and they ask me for my degree (which i don't have) because it counts more than the decade+ of work experience running my own business.
This isn't really true. The article talks about apprenticeships. While traditionally apprenticeships in the UK were mostly for blue collar work, these days you can do apprenticeships in almost anything: software engineering, law, medicine, management, etc.
What even is the most generous, steelman argument of how this could help humanity prepare for a pandemic? The article just glossed over that part.
Because after Covid it sure seems like whatever it is, there are a lot of much lower hanging fruit as far as detection, early testing, contact tracing infrastructure, understanding what air is, etc that would do a lot more to prepare for the next pandemic.
Is the joke that the news would rather report on the bicycle accident in this case and not the collapse of civilization?
I can barely tell what you're going for here, I feel like you couldn't have picked two worse examples. Road deaths are an everyday occurrence that we've all just accepted as normal so those barely make the news, and bicycles get even less attention than cars. And the "collapse of civilization" is the kind of thing people are shouting about literally every day and it's always an exaggeration and pure opinion.
Uh, what? The guy runs big elaborate game shows. The contestants are thrilled for the chance to compete to win money. How could you spin that as exploiting people's misery?