Cited on HN 6 times, 2024–2025, never outright recommendedscore 0
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026
HN mentions it in MrBeast threads as the source of allegations, often in a critical or skeptical context, not as a recommendation.
A 54-minute video by a former MrBeast worker alleging that MrBeast's operation is fraudulent, including claims that some contests are staged or manipulated.
[this video] That’s the original video that kicked it off. It’s pretty mundane as far as internet controversy goes. The lotteries were run poorly and as such were probably illegal, not exactly uncommon on YouTube. The show largely targets kids, so there’s some accusations of it effectively being gambling for kids. After that people dug into his whole life and found out one of his employees was convicted of statutory rape and he was aware, which is a bad look for a channel mostly watched by children. It’s like a 3/10 on internet controversy scales. Doing something common and dumb but not obviously malicious, and then just stuff that looks bad without concrete evidence anything bad actually happened. It’s not terribly interesting, I only saw because of a comedian making fun of it.
In case people aren’t aware of the “fraud” accusations mentioned in this comment, here’s a video: [this video] There are many more discussing all that has come out recently about that channel.
See [this video] It alleges that many of the “contests” are staged and artificially manipulated and potentially violate laws around such games. I think to many that might feel like fraud.
Does anyone remember when this person who worked for Mr Beast outed their fraudulent tactics? You couldn’t bring it up in a comment on their videos at all. They had a team continuous censoring all honest discussion on their videos. I find the whole phenomenon around Beast to be gross. [this video]
It’s funny how he’s admired by Chamath and other Silicon Valley types for his entrepreneurship or good deeds or whatever when the core of how his channel works is deceiving viewers [this video]
I just pass on this video from a former Mr Beast employee that tends to open people’s eyes up. Mr Beast has tried every tactic to bury and suppress this. In particular deleting all mention of it on any social media where his team can delete comments / replies. [this video]
Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.
6 Hacker News comments
From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.
Read more