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Comment by 1245-a17z | Hacker News Reader

Who watches the 10,000th iteration of "locking up 100 people in $place and who stays the longest gets $100,000", badly filmed and badly presented?

The pioneers of this genre were Big Brother by RTL in the 1990s. It was at least professionally produced.

It is hard not to think of viewbotting.

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MrBeast stuff is professionally produced. He is only the face and boss of a large company with a lot of employees.

They don’t look very professional in the Folding Ideas video. They look like a bunch of 20 something friends with outsized resources bumbling their way to content production. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0dwagg5wYY4&ra=m

Yeah. In the videos I've seen, the execution has been weak and haphazard.

And yet, they are massively successful measuring by content consumption and profitability. Those outsized resources come from actual money their videos make.

Would you rather be an investor in a “professional” production like Madame Web which was very well produced by well known people and studios and lost a high 8 figure amount, or invested in a YouTube channel that appears to be 20 something friends “bumbling their way to content production” that reliably rakes in millions.

It may look bumbling and disorganized, but they are consistently producing the most viewed content on YouTube and making millions.

One of my main investing goals is to not support highly finalized nihilistic slop factories that target children

Lot of people like repetitive content it seems. And that goes for everything. I have no idea of music, but I have understood that people tend to listen to same genres inside which things are pretty much the same. Same goes for TV shows, soap operas and sitcoms are popular. Same thing repeated for countless episodes. In general lot of tv shows were a story of the week variety. Movies too. Sequel after sequel or some generic thing following same tropes and plot points... Oh and why not lot of books. Mostly same thing repeated in each book with slight variations...

I think people just might like formulaic repetitive content...

I watch a guy solve a sudoku every day. The puzzle is always different, but conceptually it's just a minor variant of the same video. I don't watch Mr Beast or that sort of content but I can't judge anyone who does.

I used to love playing Magic The Gathering. But the hygiene issues at LGS and trolling issues with MTGO left me bereft. I found a YT channel which mostly played the sorts of decks I like (control) so I latched onto that as my MTG outlet. The exact same format over and over again, but it scratched the right itch to keep me coming back. Up until they added Members Only videos.

Simon or Mark?

> It is hard not to think of viewbotting.

I'm sure there are a lot of people (mostly kids) who legitimately watch MrBeast's content, but I'm also convinced that viewbotting to boost numbers is much more widespread than is generally acknowledged across YouTube, Twitch, etc, and the platforms don't really care so long as the advertisers don't make a stink about it.

It seems like every couple of years they'll do some bare minimum pruning of the most egregious outliers to make a show to the advertisers that something is being done and then things slide back to normal within weeks to months.

Children

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