There’s no doubt many of you have seen this Pinely video called The MrBeast-ification of YouTube. For those that haven’t, the TL; DW (too long; didn’t watch) is the right-honourable gentleman arguing that the MrBeast way of doing YouTube has led to a lot of people taking YouTube seriously essentially mimicking what Jimmy does, but badly. To the point of being summarised by him as having two characteristics only: Being loud and being charitable. That’s it. Here’s how he articulated the issue concisely:
“The problem is that because MrBeast has reached this level of popularity that has just surpassed anything that has ever happened on YouTube, people just take every single word of his as gospel. Like they’re getting advice from Jesus Christ himself.”
So, let’s take a look at one example of a copycat that not only does this but also has a dreadful personality to boot when his guard is down. And that’s Brent Rivera. One random day, I saw the thumbnail and title of a video I was curious about. Specifically, this one. Unfortunately, the presentation was frankly even worse than a MrBeast video. It was several really interesting events that could have been self-contained videos crammed into just 8 Minutes and 35 Seconds. Starting with the learning of basic ice skating moves from a professional couple before jumping, after just 1 minute and 17 seconds, to a female facing her fear of flying in a legitimate Fighter Jet for 1 minute and 35 seconds. A couples yoga session (with some questionable poses) lasts just 42 seconds before the main event advertised in the cold opening takes up the rest of the run-time. It’s essentially a giant toilet crafted by a friend of the creator in question that becomes the arena for several other friends who find themselves taking part in a good ol’ fashioned endurance test. Several torments are then thrown at this group until all but one of them reach their breaking point and call it quits, forfeiting their chance at winning $10,000 in Brent Bucks (not a real currency).
Now, that’s only one video. But even when I took the liberty of looking through a few others, I came to the same conclusion each time: So many interesting self-contained videos edited down to nothing but TikTok shorts. Like, in the example I cited alone, I would have found it really interesting to see if those who went Ice Skating actually did a decent job with the basics after an hour of falls. I also would have found it interesting to see that Fighter Jet doing acrobatics, somersaults and other things a Fighter Jet does from multiple angles to a loop of this royalty free song. As well as the group on the ground having to deal with the effects of the afterburn. Roman Attwood accomplished this kind of feat when Tanner Fox created Dusty Doughnuts and drove his School Bus into his pond in 2017. Not only that, but Roman actually documented the process of getting the Bus up and running and other things that happened before and after the main event over the course of the day. But with Brent’s video, it was basically a week of events he has the privilege of doing delivered in bitesize chunks that left me confused as to why they were cut down to practically nothing but footnotes.
You may have noticed that I used the term privilege. But I think it’s that which contributes to his dreadful personality. And one incident in particular where it reared its ugly head was in 2023. Tyler Oliveira (who has his own can of worms I’ll be opening in a moment) booked into a hotel. A hotel that, coincidentally, Mr. Rivera was filming a video in at the same time. Tyler was curious about what was going on and quickly concluded that a fake video was being produced by Brent’s crew; with two girls he spotted at the end of a hallway providing evidence supporting his hypothesis. Despite one of them saying Maybe(?) to the question of whether they were hired exclusively for the purpose of Brent’s video, something to put a pin on for later. Meanwhile, Tyler decides to grill Brent further on his videos, which he assumes everyone who is not his target audience knows are fake and based on ideas he “stole” from other content creators. Brent, naturally, denies the accusation and turns the question on Tyler, who returns to his hotel room to get ready for an excursion he planned a few days beforehand.
When he goes to the hotel lobby, he encounters Brent again, who fires the shot of “Hey, uh, go have fun with your 100 subscribers.” It then escalates into a primary school yard insult match that a security guard brings to an end. Tyler then engages in the activity he booked before encountering Brent again on the same floor his room is in. But instead of being a reasonable human being and getting on with the rest of his day, Tyler engages in a tit for tat war of words with Brent and his group. He constantly argues that he paid between $375 and $400 for his hotel room and deserves to make use of it. However, antagonising a hotel guest is never appropriate, irrespective of whether the motivation is justified or not. This leads to Brent calling local police who engage in a process of removing Tyler from the premises, who ends his video by calling Brent his number one enemy, minutes after referring to him, sarcastically, as his idol.
Initially when this went down, a lot of people piled on Brent for being childish for how he responded to Tyler’s spit balls, exaggerating the incident in his own response to it on Social Media, and giving the impression that his 36.8 Million YouTube Subscribers (at the time of writing) are just numbers that feed his bank account and Arrogant Rich Kid vibe. But as the dust settled, Tyler came in for criticism as well for, as I have pointed out, agitating the group unnecessarily instead of just moving swiftly along which I think a reasonable person would have done.
Tyler Oliveira is also responsible for insulting the craft of investigative journalism! Why do I say that? It started with Thought Slime who exposed one of his videos because of a multitude of issues. From the thumbnail and runtime being instant red flags, since how the hell can you realistically “investigate” something as complex as drug legalisation in 14 minutes, to statistics being presented either half-baked or completely out of context, to having someone “specialising” in the field you’re looking into be your source despite an incredibly questionable track record, to filming things without proper consent or respect of boundaries and finally, exaggerating things you record and misrepresenting the thoughts and feelings of people interacted with. As someone who wants to do Journalism in the future, it breaks my heart to see this slop being put out there and millions of people consuming it without taking a step back and even questioning the title at the very least. There’s a reason the BBC’s Panaroma and ITV’s Tonight are programmes that analyse emerging current affairs the way they do for the length they do. That’s proper journalism in action. Do they get it right all the time? Obviously not. But at least they have processes in place to ensure that what they present is based on research, and not just instinct or vibe checks. Also, this J Aubrey video has shown that it’s not just one video where Oliveira is dreadful at journalism. It’s practically every video. At least since he jumped from one sinking ship to this one. But it’s not just him who is terrible at making compelling arguments. Or handling sensitive issues with grace and decorum.
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