It's lost me, I have heard of MrBeast and know he's extremely popular, but that's at it. I think the article is written from the perspective of someone who's in the fandom and that youtube doesn't really have content outside of it.
I've never watched his videos but I use YT without logging in and flush cookies on browser restart. With no viewer profile, YT heavily promotes his content on the front page.
Point seems rather clear to me: yt was about making ‘fun content’, now it is about maximizing clicks and views. Of course we can argue what is fun content, but it’s the same complaint as what with the internet as a whole: click-bait vs real content.
Speaking to YT, many creators i watch needs to be prefaced with please like and comment, because these long videos are algorithm poison.
>With shorts/reels/tiktoks, long form fun content no longer works.
Yes, and no. It's weird. YT very much does want creators to make shorts. They take a bigger cut after all, and it's the big trend. But the traditional algorithms (from what I hear from creator who talk about the topic) hasn't changed too radically. The 8 minute target point is still a factor and longform videos still seem to be rewarded.
I imagine YT is just trying to hit on multiple fronts. Shorts are for the Tiktok crowd while the normal videos are still tailored towards people who come to YT to get more substantial content.
>But that is not the point made in this article, at all.
The article directly mentions your point though:
>So far, much of what’s been heralded in YouTube’s era of MrBeast sounds bleak, but the next era might already be upon us. If the old YouTube was Instagram, the new YouTube will be more like TikTok. That manifests in literal ways, with the company putting much of its energy into “shorts,” but also figuratively, beyond structural elements. TikTok’s strength lies in its ability to surface videos from everyday users to an enormous audience, and it’s so good at doing this that people talk about its algorithm in mystical terms.
Would you rather watch it condensed in a 30 second TikTok? You could then decide in the first 10 seconds if it's worth wasting your life with the remaining 20 seconds, or to go on swiping, chasing the next dopamine rush.
I agree, while I just can not stand MrBeast or his videos, and I can not explain it (maybe they are just nothing but attention grabbers and have nothing to offer), I feel like this article also falls into "attention grabber with nothing foundational to offer".
I stopped watching anything I am not deliberately searching for on YouTube, as they all seem to be MrBeast copy-cats. Never heard of this person they are interviewing in the article, but again, the article itself seemed to go nowhere... maybe we were duped, and that was the point?
Au contraire; imho the article offers several good viewpoints.
But I'm undecided about who/what it says more: MrBeast & his antics, his audience, YT, its audience, other populair platforms & their audience, today's public in general, or how its preferences are changing.
Personally I prefer authenticity, uniqueness. Seek out stuff that's found nowhere else. For which # of views are (mostly?) irrelevant as long as creators & maybe their audience enjoy it.
Perhaps MrBeast is authentic in that way: copycats aplenty, but no-one is doing, or living exactly like him.
>But I'm undecided about who/what it says more: MrBeast & his antics, his audience, YT, its audience, other populair platforms & their audience, today's public in general, or how its preferences are changing.
I think it's a sign of a new generation approaching the internet in a different way. We're at a point where Gen Alpha is starting to hit its teens and social media isn't a flashy new tool but a medium of life. When everything starts out shiny, nothing is. So they will start to cut through the glitter and simply be efficient with the platform. short form content made for the smartphone they co-existed with their whole life, a focus on more relatable creators (or the appearance of relatable) instead of the most eye catching, and a general resistance to clickbait and ads that have disappointed them young and early.
meanwhile, the Genz/late millenial era is aging into its 30's and their interests are shifting. They literally grew out of the high energy roller coaster style of content and are likely still cynical of the world they grew into. They've had their fun but they will probably settle into different forms of content on Youtube. and/or creators will adjust their formats. I remember the early 10's era of "skit comedy" where every video felt like it needed to copy AVGN/Nostalgia critic and insert small skits between their reviews/analysis. That's pretty much all shifted towards a more documentary style of video with minimal fluff (or at the very most, very short interjections with meme visuals/sound FX, usually using the piece of media in question).
>I feel like this article also falls into "attention grabber with nothing foundational to offer".
>I stopped watching anything I am not deliberately searching for on YouTube, as they all seem to be MrBeast copy-cats.
you seem to inadvertently understand the point of the article and are in fact a subject of the supposed shift away from the Mr. Beast era. I think the issue is the article focuses too much on Mr. Beast, who is more of a metaphor for the actual trend than the actual subject of interest. When you cut out the biography you end up with 2 core points:
1. the "high energy" style of videos that feel like it's trying to dangle keys at you is shifting towards more authentic experiences (which apparently tiktok does)
2. people in general are shifting from long form to short form content with #1 as a factor. I do know Tiktok's biggest appeal is that it's really good at highlighting smaller creators, which works opposite to most other kind of social media.
That could have been the focus instead of going over Beast's entire life story and thought process on how he makes videos. But Polygon is ironically in that same bus, knowing most people will click to focus on Beast instead of the actual "era" in question.
I think it's a sloppy attempt at a takedown. For some reason, MrBeast really gets under the skin of a tiny, loud group of progressives who try to make him out to be the bad guy, and this article feels like it's just hopping on that bandwagon.
One of my favorite book series is the Wheel of Time and the author uses a phrase (or variation of it) that often comes to mind when I see thumbnails of Mr Beast:
“a smile that did not reach his eyes”
Or how I often describe him “some of the deadest eyes I’ve seen”.
The first iPhone had a crappy camera, was quite expensive compared to simpler cameras many people had, and didn’t even record video. Even if you consider “at first” to be half a decade since inception, the “prototypical” creator was definitely not recording from an iPhone in their bedroom.
>Even if you consider “at first” to be half a decade since inception
in the grand scheme of tech, sure. Around this same time, Justin.tv wasn't even off the ground yet. Companies fail fast often these days, so it can be easy to forget that a few companies had to invest years before hey even saw a spark.
Regardless, this seems to be a nitpick that doesn't amount to much. be it a crappy hand camera recorded with an unregistered hypercam 2 or early smartphones as cameras developed, the main point was that Youtube started out very amateur before Google came in.
The article meanders quite a bit, and I feel lacks a proper critique of what's wrong with MrBeast.
I have a strong disgust for most of the things he does, and it's taken me a bit to put into words where that comes from. It's a multitude of factors, but it comes down to:
- it's all about money. There's no moral or lesson in his videos, other than money is the most important thing in life.
- it's almost always meaningless. His challenges don't give growth or fulfilment to those taking them, it's just monkeys dancing for money.
- the style feels as obviously manipulative as can be, and the fact that people fall for it is more infuriating than the actual content.
I might have a similar perspective, and maybe these words (not mine) can help further articulate why he is an agent of a sinister force:
---
i have seen many people spill their guts on-line, and i did so myself until, at last, i began to see that i had commodified myself. commodification means that you turn something into a product which has a money-value. in the nineteenth century, commodities were made in factories, which karl marx called “the means of production.” capitalists were people who owned the means of production, and the commodities were made by workers who were mostly exploited. i created my interior thoughts as a means of production for the corporation that owned the board i was posting to, and that commodity was being sold to other commodity/consumer entities as entertainment. that means that i sold my soul like a tennis shoe and i derived no profit from the sale of my soul.
---
IMO, he is an excellent example of people knowingly leveraging that commodification to generate money, and that is why I personally don't like his content.
Thank you for that, very interesting read. I've become convinced that the thinkers of the 60s and 70s pretty much figured out how technology would corrupt society (see for instance Lewis Mumford, Marshal McLuhan), but there's no money in coordinating solutions.
A lot of Mr Beast's "philanthropy" is ineffective and therefore worthless. He's giving away fish, not teaching people how to fish. I.e., giving away money at random does not bring about systemic change.
The hungry will be happy to eat the fish. I dislike Mr Beast, but it doesn't mean that giving things for those in need is bad, especially in the case of hunger.
Here's the issue: His videos are obvious extremely carefully framed. He does not have any dead air in them. They are exactly how long they need to be to maximize the algorithm, and not a second more.
Teaching is boring, a long process, and will lose eyeballs. He may very well be giving the people fishing rods behind the scenes after he's done shooting, or simply plain old money to the town for whatever they need. But that will never show up in the video. he getting the money shots as he throws fishes to the masses and seeing them tear up.
Almost all people have two lines: the first is "I don't like this, it's just not my thing." and the second is "This is bad and the world would be better without it". Your argument applies to the first line, not the second one. For instance, do you think it's ok to let entertainment programs advertise cigarettes to children? Or would you be ok with fights to the death, if it were legal?
I'm not arguing to ban MrBeast, I just find it disgusting and wanted to share my opinion in the comment section, usually used for that.
I'm not a sports fan, but people who say sports are braindead don't understand why people watch sports. A hypercasual sportsgoer that only knows the most basic rules won't get anymore enjoyment out of a professional football game than a reader who opens up chapter 12 of a new book and starts reading. Context matters and is missing in both cases.
They probably have, many a time, but you might be in the audience category that has autoplay disabled and actively refuses to click on clickbaity thumbnails?
It is just cable, but online. Interdimensional cable, at this point.
'member when people used to obsess over what to watch on Netflix? And the brief "golden age of TV" that gave us Breaking Bad? I stopped caring for such conversations in a pub in Barcelona where people were gathering each weekend to watch the last season of Game of Thrones (first week was packed, slowly decreased to 3 people by the finale, never to be spoken off again after almost a decade as watercooler fodder).
There really is nothing to watch on Netflix. There is nothing "mainstream-y" to watch on YouTube. There's no real need to keep up because the shared experience has fragmented and gone. MrBeast supposedly has hundreds of millions of viewers but I've never met one. It just doesn't come up in the real world. Who cares.
And soon all will be generated images by AI. Like an impossibly advanced version of the arch toys they put over cribs. You don't have to jack into any of these things, you never did.
>There's no real need to keep up because the shared experience has fragmented and gone. MrBeast supposedly has hundreds of millions of viewers but I've never met one. It just doesn't come up in the real world.
Article briefly touches on that and it can honestly be its own topic:
>It’s unlikely we’ll see MrBeast dethroned anytime soon, and even less likely that the incoming class of creators will reach his same viewership. Monoculture of that sort is a vanishing rarity, nor a marker of quality
An inevitable part of unshackling from cable television, but an unforunate one from the mindset of a collective social mindscape. You make a spongebob or Friends or Family GUy meme and you'll probably resonate with an entire generation. Not so much with, say, Severance or The Owl House or Invincible.
>Who cares.
well, a lot of people. Someone has to care to make it, air it, and then someone has to care to consume it. We don't have monocultures anymore but we can find intimate gatherings online that will do the equivalent.
But yeah, if it's not professional sports, there's no longer a "icebreaker" media that will always be safe. Game of Thrones may have very well been the last (and waning) cry for such a show. millenials can still fall back to 90's/2000's media that had that impact, but gen alpha may or may not have such experiences.
Apologies for the long comment. I'd need a few hours to edit this down and I don't have the time.
__MrBeast is not the problem, social media addiction is__
MrBeast represents the biggest common denominator of why people are on the platform. Not everyone on YouTube will like his videos (I presume many on HN are uninterested in his videos), but a very big group does. Why? For the same reason why my parents watch game shows on the television: entertainment.
I find MrBeast his videos most related to game shows with him being the game show host. It's not always the strict format of a game show, but looking at it from that perspective shows what style of video he's making.
Who doesn't like a fun game show? Most people do!
And I think that's okay. People will copy him, it'll be the dominant culture on YouTube. That's okay too. It's okay because authenticity won't go away. Authentic people on YouTube aren't under threat or under fire. I watch a lot of YouTube channels that have 100K to 1 million subs and they seem authentic to me and I love them for it. Also, let's not forget: MrBeast seems authentic about how he goes about YouTube on some of these channels (on their podcast). MrBeast is authentic for anyone who gets off the general (unoptimized) front page and just look at a couple of interviews of him.
The only issue that I see is that the YouTube recommendation algorithm has a bias towards promoting popular content. For some users on YouTube (e.g. me) that is unfortunate because that's not how I want to use YouTube. But I click on it and I get addicted to it and now they have me.
So for that reason: I call upon psychologists and psychiatrists to help people with YouTube addiction (email me if you are one. My email is in my profile. I'm a software engineer/web developer). Even an online course on dealing with YouTube addiction can help a lot to go against the addictive quality of YouTube.
Currently, I'm in the process of helping myself (I've studied psychology and game-design so I know a thing or two). The method that seems to have some results with me is as follows.
__Overcoming YouTube/social media addiction__
1. I sit in a chair and tell myself that this is my life now. All I can do is sit. I can think, I can look or listen. But I can't leave the chair.
2. My mind will want to watch YouTube. I resist the urge, I have to keep on sitting in the chair.
3. At some point my mind - out of sheer desperation - will yell at me "alright, alright! I'll do anything. You wanna be better at math? I'll do this math course you're following right now. As long as I can do something else than just sitting in a chair!" This happens after 15 to 30 minutes.
4. At that point, you can do that activity. The moment you go to YouTube and watch a video, you put yourself back in the chair and you start at step 1.
It's brutal. Addiction is brutal. For me, this method is quite effective. I hope it helps someone.
__How I discovered this method__
I wish I could say it was "I studied psychology and xyz studied mentioned it." The real story is different.
I was so fed up with myself that I told myself that I'm going to sit on my chair and that's all life is now. I know addiction when I see it and I saw it within myself. I became incredibly angry at myself. So a lifetime banishment on the chair is what I was going to do until something broke. Of course, I knew my anger wouldn't hold out but I felt so angry that I decided to give in anyway, just to see what happens.
After 20 minutes, my mind started screaming and pleading to do math. Then, I did math. Suddenly, for the next week, I did 5 hours of math per day (currently in between jobs). I watched about 20 minutes of YouTube per day (as opposed to 6 hours). Those 20 minutes of YouTube were mostly informational math videos for when I got stuck with a concept.
I realized I stumbled upon a method that worked for me. It also made me realize that this method is changing my relationship with boredom. I'm becoming more comfortable with it. However, I am not seeing the full picture on boredom yet. I will, and when I do, then I'll update my method. For now what I do see: when one is sufficiently bored, then they are sufficiently _intrinsically_ motivated to do more or less anything. Boredom is uncomfortable, even painful, just to get out of that pain one will do anything to stave away boredom. It's currently the best intrinsic motivational spark that I've found to get myself to do anything. I have a lot of intrinsic motivation on things, but not a lot of intrinsic motivational spark. Enter boredom, it is an intrinsic motivational spark to get you going on the project you'd have wanted to do for years (in my case: becoming better at math).
Interesting to hear someone else with that method!
Mine is a little different, to suit different circumstances (I think I have a problem with YouTube and other online venues, but not 6hr+ per day).
For me, it boils down to the phrase "start the day right". When I wake up, I can default to opening the laptop and finding something interesting to look at, or I can sit and wait until I think of something else to do. If I can maintain the willpower needed, it only takes a few minutes for my brain to tell me there's something much more useful or interesting to do.
>All I can do is sit. I can think, I can look or listen. But I can't leave the chair.
I think that's even worse for me. I can in fact sit in a chair and get stuck in my own head for hours. I've even stayed awake in my bed for hours, no TV, no computer, ignoring phone notificataions, being stuck in my own thoughts. Buzzing thoughts about my job, my life, my past, family, choices I should have taken, choices I should not have taken, or just random triva I gathered over the year. My mind can never truly be quiet, something will pop up and fade just as quickly to the next tangential thought.
It's just not productive and I usually end up more remorseful than when I sat down. I try to get outside or do literally anything else to avoid getting stuck there. I can never truly be "bored" so I may as well try to distract with something productive. Or not productive but not depressing.
