Comment by Invictus0
5 days ago
Breathless navel gazing. It's not that he's wrong, it's just that this article adds nothing new to the conversation other than excessively technical mumbo jumbo. Just read MrBeast's original document.
5 days ago
Breathless navel gazing. It's not that he's wrong, it's just that this article adds nothing new to the conversation other than excessively technical mumbo jumbo. Just read MrBeast's original document.
The actual work underlying the essay - the one published in Cambridge Core - is pretty strong and has a lot of pretty compelling analysis. It's just long.
I disagree that it's strong, I got up to section five and it's written in the same "I am very smart and this is very important" style while saying very little of substance and bouncing around like a rabbit on speed.
The central thesis that demand creates supply is also just very obviously false, no one was searching for "100 identical twins fight for $250k" before Mr beast made that video. People watch Mr beast because they want 20 minutes of whimsical predictably mind numbing colorful emotional fast paced distraction and Mr beast fills that need perfectly with videos of all kinds. He transports viewers to a fantasy land far beyond their real world, where boredom doesn't exist and crazy things are possible. No one knew they wanted an iPod until Steve jobs showed it to them; they just wanted a better CD player. Same thing with YouTube; people just show up and click on something the algorithm puts in their way, there isn't a demand for anything really. No one knew they wanted a Mr beast. The consumer demand is some combination of distraction, entertainment, or education, it's not much deeper than that.
Ironically I think one huge contribution that YouTube has made for the good is elevating the quality of STEM didactics. Channels like 3blue1brown and Veritasium have shown what STEM instruction could look like when not relegated to tenured professors who DGAF about teaching.