Sounds like B Ark material to me....

Despite watching a lot of Youtube content on the big TV, I've never watched much of the Youtube star Mr Beast (nor that PewDiePie) - from what little I have seen, their content or personality did not strike me as engaging.   I suspect nearly all of their audience would be under 30, and my general impression is that there is something, shall we say, youthfully shallow?, about both these guys.   Maybe I'm being mean, or just old?  

Anyhoo, I'm writing about someone I'm not interested in because of the lengthy article about Mr Beast at the NYT, talking about why some people have taken to promoting positive dislike and distrust of him, despite much of his channel being about random acts of altruism.   I'll gift the article here.

A few things leaping out at me about it:

a.    how incredibly bad is the American health care system if a poor family can't get their kid a cataract operation without the intervention of charity?  

b.    the explanation of how Mr Beast built a Youtube empire is a bit of a worry:

For most of his teenage years, “I woke up, I studied YouTube, I studied videos, I studied filmmaking, I went to bed and that was my life,” Donaldson once told Bloomberg. “I hardly had any friends because I was so obsessed with YouTube,” he said on “The Joe Rogan Experience” last year. After high school, he hooked up with a gang of similarly obsessed “lunatics” and planned out a program of study. He and his friends “did nothing but just hyperstudy what makes a good video, what makes a good thumbnail, what’s good pacing, how to go viral,” he told Rogan. “We’d do things like take a thousand thumbnails and see if there’s correlation to the brightness of the thumbnail to how many views it got. Videos that got over 10 million views, how often do they cut the camera angles? Things like that.”

 You know what I think of when I read that? - "Straight to the B Ark with you, young man!"   

c.    the article makes a point that is probably is at the core of the older person's reaction to him:

I’ll admit that I agree with some of those critics, at least to the extent that I think it would be nice if a person with Donaldson’s platform and resources (and evident desire to help people) cast a closer eye on structural problems with the American health care system and on the everyday injustices visited on disabled people. But I can also see how this kind of criticism misunderstands what the MrBeast channel is and how it works. Having kicked his flywheel into action, Donaldson from here can only really keep it spinning. Any deviation might threaten the perpetual motion of his growth machine. (Imagine being 12 years old: Do you want to watch an explainer on private-equity roll-ups of primary-care practices?)

Yep:  he may be doing good charitable work (while making many, many millions himself), but it's a bit fiddling around the edges of what really does the most people good.