Is “MrBeast” Good?

[Sage_Rat]

@Dr.Strangelove

I doubt there’s anything about MrBeast than the obvious: his brand of “philanthropy” is a pretty good business. He doesn’t seem to pursue actual high-impact results with the money, but it’s hardly evil. It’s not the worst thing he could do with the money.

Winning the lottery often produces a negative result in the winner’s life - financing their gambling habit, alcoholism, etc. What effect it has depends on the recipient and the structure of the charitable act.

If he’s not focusing on impact evaluation and ensuring that his charitable acts are actually producing good effects then he could be engaging in a form of negligent malevolence.

Most likely, he’s having fairly minimal impact either way but I suspect that follow-up studies would show that there were some activities that were more effective and some that were more negative.

[Dr_Paprika]

I mean, if you needed an essential but expensive operation, that would seem to make a lot of difference for that person. It wouldn’t effect things at the population level for the same reason a medical anecdote is not really data.

[Loach]

@BigT

The one thing I want to note is that the promotion he does in his videos is how he raised the money for the charitable acts. All the money he gets from people who watch the video fund the next charitable act he does.

So it’s not just him using it for self-promotion. His self-promotion allows him to do the charitable acts.

His charitable acts are his content. They are his product. At some point the snake is eating it’s own tail.

I am not his demographic and I have not sampled a lot of his content. What I have seen is not needs based. He’s not looking for people in need. He’s looking for people to surprise with random acts. And that’s fine. Everyone has needs. If regular people are benefiting that’s not a bad thing. It’s better content if some random person plays a game and wins some money out of the blue than if he hands over a check to St Jude’s. I’m sure he does a lot of straight up charity to worthy causes but he’s also selling the fantasy that MrBeast might pick me some day and give me money.

[Buck_Godot]

I only learned about Mr. Beast when I heard some promoter of some platform (Musk/Twitter perhaps?) making a big deal about how they were going to lure Mr. Beast away from Youtube, which led me to try to figure out who this guy that was that was such a big deal but I’d never heard of.

I watched a few of his videos and found them vaguely distasteful for reasons that are hard to articulate, but basically boil down to it being all about the Benjamins. Near as I can tell his videos are all about him spending/giving away tons of money like a real life Brewster’s millions and everyone being impressed by how much money’s involved. Overall I find American’s obsession with money a turn off. As a prime example American producers in my opinion ruined the American version of the British Baking show when they decided (probably correctly) that the only way an American audience would get engaged in the contest is if they added a million dollar grand prize.

Also his “finger on the app” game reminded me the dance marathons of the 30’s and not in a good way. So if he gives a lot of money to charity, good for him, but his videos aren’t for me.

[Buck_Godot]

@BigT

The one thing I want to note is that the promotion he does in his videos is how he raised the money for the charitable acts. All the money he gets from people who watch the video fund the next charitable act he does.

Interested in seeing a break down of money collected vs money spent on

1. Production costs (not counting giveaways, but counting cost of, say, staying in worlds most expensive hotel)
2. Money/prizes given to random people
3. Money given to actual charities
4. Money collected for Mr. Beasts personal fortune.

Note that I don’t count money in the second category to be philanthropy. Otherwise you are going to have to start calling Wheel of fortune or publisher’s clearing house philanthropy.