Title essentially. Youtube’s algorithm is hot garbage, so I can’t search for anything anymore without a ton of AI slop and rage bait. So, who do you go to for actual good long form videos? Exposes, scandals, behind the scenes, documentaries, film, travel, transit, who do you recommend I follow?
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Big recommendation for Nebula. It’s dirt cheap and has all this type of content ad-free, downloadable, play in background, etc
Haven’t seen it here yet, but it’s one of the greatest and most prolific YouTube channels about science fiction and the future… Science Fiction and Futurism With Isaac Arthur
Just FYI he’s got a bit of a speech impediment, but after like 2-3 episodes you don’t really hear it and the content is so fantastic. He’s a legit physicist and the President of the American National Space Society, so he’s very respected outside just creator circles.
This Old Tony - if you like tools, machines, and clever dad jokes. He’s the best.
Epimetheus. High quality history videos on past and current civilizations. His hand drawn art is amazing too, he tries to stay very historically accurate. No theatrical narration, just a broad view of history. My favorite channel by far.
Dr Becky. Very very good science communication on astronomy and cosmology. She always sources the papers she mentions and excels at making you understand basic astrophysics. Best explanations of a very hard topic.
Angela Collier, another science communication more focused on physics and the epistemology of the field. I love her personal perspective on all the drama in physics (e.g. why Feinman is overhyped, why it’s still such a terribly sexist field etc.) though she makes it clear that it’s her channel and her opinions. Much more detailed explanations of physics but a little harder to understand.
City Nerd data driven showcase on why cars are bad for cities, usually in a top 10 of cities ranked by some metric of transportation.
Mostly history documentaries below:
- Fall of Civilization (takes forever to upload stuff, but it’s always superb quality)
- Kings and Generals (wars, historic battles and the context surrounding them)
- Study of Antiquity and the Middle Ages (several videos show the very likely migrations of different peoples in ancient times)
- Ancient Americas (north, central and south americas)
- Real Time History (most videos are ~27 minutes, but the Franco Prussian war is a whopping 6 hours and worth it)
Crime pays botany doesn’t
the only thing i love more than that guy is that nobody in the comments can agree on what his name is
Preface - I enjoy car stuff, so there’s more than a few car channels here:
- Legit Street Cars
- Deboss Garage
- David Freiburger (roadtrips)
- Louis Rossmann (when he does long stuff)
- DefunctLand
- Junkyard Dave
- Technology Connections (No-effort November is wonderful)
Contrapoints is one of the youtube GOATs for a reason. High production values, thought provoking content, and a level of thought and honesty that’s powerful. Her video that’s absolutely definitely about twilight and nothing else caused days of discussion with my wife.
Folding Ideas is a documentarian with a film background. He’s most famous for his videos about NFTs and meme stocks, but all his videos are excellent. “I don’t know James Rolfe” was a youtube filmmaker descending into madness attempting to understand another one.
Philosophy Tube is a woman who got pissed that the UK was raising tuitions so she committed to giving away the knowledge she got in her philosophy degree. Sometimes she plays with clickbait, but in a very self aware way. Her content is definitely meant to make you think
Hbomberguy is a man who made a 4 hour video about youtube plagiarism so popular the Onion referenced it. He’s largely a video game critic but does some deep dives into political topics like climate denial, flat earth, and antivax
Sarah Z is a older gen z media and fandom critic who largely leans towards Tumblr oriented topics. She consistently has good takes. I really liked her video on how the internet talks about narcissists that I watched over the weekend.
Strange Aeons is probably my suggestion people are least likely to like. She’s like if Sarah Z was a lot weirder. You want someone to explain the omegaverse or Snapewives or the other bizarre outlets of fandom in a wat that’s generally respectful to them? She’s got you. In particular I like how she’s respectful towards weirdness when it’s not harmful and that she treats trolls as the performance artists they can be.
Practical engineering is youtube for the sort of people who think bridges can be interesting. He’s a civil engineer with a fair bit of charisma talking about civil engineering.
Stuff made here is for when you want impractical engineering. He’s a dork who designs and builds weird shit for its own sake.
Defunctland, listen I’m not really into amusement parks that much, but this guy makes them fascinating to hear about.
Additional creators I forgot or left out:
Lady Emily is Sarah Z’s cowriter’s channel. It’s definitely weirder but in a direction completely different from the way strange aeons is. She doesn’t care to make her content have mainstream appeal and so it winds up being an autistic woman making videos about stuff she finds interesting.
Innuendo Studios is someone I intentionally left out for two reasons: a lot of his videos are short and they’re very political. But they aren’t low effort ragebait political, they’re analyses of modern right wing rhetorical tactics. I’m including him now purely because he’s one of my favorite youtubers
Münecat is a long form video essayist who started with anti-mlm content and has moved into other topics like internet gambling and debunking evo psych.
I’ll add more comments if I think of more
For stuff about films, I like ‘Thomas Flight’ and ‘Like Stories Of Old’. LSOO has just released a video about Gladiator II that I’m going to watch in a bit (I’m hoping he hated it as much as I did!)
Nerd³ (nerd cubed) long form video game content while he talks about the game he’s playing, sprinkled with commentary about life and current events
Cold Fusion. Sort of a mini documentary on news items, one item at a time. Tech focused.
who do you recommend I follow?
What I like may not be what you like at all. I mean, depends on your interests.
And I don’t “follow” any of these, watch every thing when it comes out. These are just some YouTubers for whom I’ve had a high proportion of their material wind up being something that I feel is worth watching.
Does military history, mostly naval. Does not put out a lot of videos, but from the ones that I do follow, has really done his research through the written material out there before putting the material out, does a good job of highlighting what’s important.
To a lesser degree, Drachinifel and The Operations Room. They’re also military history, but I don’t feel like they do as much research or highlight the important bits as well. Drachinifel focuses more on surface gun-era naval warfare, and The Operations Room tends to deal with newer stuff.
The Slow Mo Guys. Not exactly deep stuff, but they do one thing: high-quality interesting slow-motion footage. Pretty popular, so you may have heard of them before. I think it might be interesting to have some sort of analogous channel that does videos of microscope stuff, pans around something with a nice microscope.
SmarterEveryDay does, I think, a good job of explaining interesting things in our daily world from an engineering/technical standpoint; guy does a good job of researching his material. You’ll probably walk away from this knowing this that you didn’t.
CGPGrey does stick-figure illustrated things that also highlight interesting stuff, often relating to legal or political or historical stuff.
Perun does defense economics, and has had interesting and informed material on the Russo-Ukrainian War. Michael Kofman, an analyst who focuses on the Russian military, doesn’t have a YouTube channel, but many YouTube channels do interview him, and while he’s kind of dry, I also think that his material on Ukraine is pretty worthwhile – he’s consistently avoided alarmist stuff or cheerleading over the course of the war. Can find material with him via searching for his name.
One of the problems I have with YouTube a side effect of the fact that it pays content creators. I don’t have any real problem with that per se – I mean, sure, you wanna do work and get paid, that’s fine. The problem is that there’s no real “YouTube of articles”. The result is that a lot of content creators out there are putting stuff in video form that really doesn’t need to be in video form, just because they want some reasonable way to monetize it. The above videos are from people who generally take advantage of the video format (well, Michael Kofman could really do just fine on a podcast and often does, but aside from that). I’ve seen too many YouTube videos – including those being submitted on the Threadiverse – that would really be better as text and possibly image articles.
MLiG
I really enjoy Calum’s work on obscure vehicles, shipping containers, and stuff like that: https://www.youtube.com/@CalumRaasay
Mustard has other fun vehicles, often with a focus on aircraft: https://www.youtube.com/@MustardChannel
David Hilowitz does fun stuff with musical instruments (finding them, sampling them, stuff like that): https://www.youtube.com/@DavidHilowitzMusic
I love wargaming miniatures and basically the only channel I watch on the subject is Eric’s Hobby Workshop: https://www.youtube.com/@EricsHobbyWorkshop
Love David Hilowitz, he’s got such a consistent style
Do yourself a favour and watch Ed Pratt Unicycle around the world. This is one of my favourite things on YouTube, watching him go from just a kid with a weird dream to a great filmmaker and experienced traveler in such an authentic way. Highly recommended
My #1 go to is probably Cathode Ray Dude. He makes videos mostly on old tech which is what I’m very interested in.
If you’re more looking for exposing scandals there’s always Coffeezilla/Voidzill.
