Pleometric@pleometric
I believe the next frontier for Mr. Beast is violence.
People underestimate how well MrBeast understands attention mechanisms. He has tested and combined them tirelessly. If he doesn't use one, it's not for ethical reasons but because he's optimizing for a different metric.
Everything is optimized.
Status, resources, suffering, games of chance. Frequent camera changes, faces in every frame, specific color palettes. He operates from first principles, discovering what attracts attention through relentless experimentation with watch time.
Sex is notably absent from his toolkit, not because he's unaware of its power, but because he's maximizing audience breadth to include children and navigating platform rules. His innovation with "kindness content" was recognizing that high-stakes moral scenarios (escaping poverty, helping the vulnerable) could justify less palatable attention mechanisms like discomfort or what you might cynically call the soft torture in his "challenges". Violence has moral justifications but triggers disgust; sex has a strong moral-political component so it gets relegated to self-expression narratives. Neither scales like he needs.
Mind you, he only embraced "narrative" and human-interest stories after the first-order mechanical elements hit diminishing returns in the formats he could implement. As an example, just showing loads of money is fine at first, but then you need to tell a story: how all that money will help a father of two pay for his daughter's medical treatment and soften an implied,but not outright told, risk of divorce with his beautiful wife Sharon.
In the end, all of that is fluff for the display of MONEY.
MrBeast is a low-throughput flesh interface between the algorithm and video production, the closest thing we have to a human implementation of foryou.serve_next().
Does that mean you could replicate his success with just a Sora-like high-quality video models? I don't believe so.
There must be stakes. Real winners, real losers, real blood. Generated humans cannot die, feel pain, or cry with genuine joy. MrBeast currently uses contrived methods to satisfy audience schadenfreude. Advances in robotics could let him mechanize gore while keeping human participants engaged through high-fidelity teleoperation. You get to see a human enough form get slashed in half, and then a real human reap the rewards from that act of violence.
You don't have to contend with the moral quals of what just happened: no one got hurt but you got the pornography of it, i.e. the action (someone got slashed) abstracted from its function (but they didn't bleed out and die)
Too many are focused on plastic love and not enough on plastic blood.
