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?
I’m sure I have a bunch but two I haven’t seen here:
OrdinaryThings - has shifted to MUCH longer form current-events / documentarian content. Humorous and pundit-y but also informative about world news I likely missed. His yearly “The ___ Business of 20__” videos are great recaps.
Harke - Found this channel basically by accident and fell in love with it. Admittedly pretty niche about a VERY specific kind of retro, but it’s stuff I grew up with so I’m all about it. Retro adventure games and music and that kind of thing. Super underrated!
This Old Tony: home machinist that fixes stuff and makes other stuff in his garage, but does everything very well thought out. Humorous and good editing.
I like longer form sailing channels that avoid the more obvious place or lack basic sailing skills and are frankly dangerous. I don’t get to sail as much as I like so this is a good look and what I would rather be doing.
Maddison Boat Works their recent videos are of their epic tour of the Pacific Ocean, the road less travelled. Beautifully shot and narrated.
NBJS single-handed sailing in the North Sea, often in bad weather.
Alluring Arctic depending what time period you pick there is a wide range of mostly arctic sailing. They recently did the North West passage and are currently over wintering in Greenland.
Along with Technology Connections, Philosophy Tube, and Primitive Technology, here are my “must watch” subs
Climate Town - Excellent videos about climate change and environmental impact that are insightful and funny
Contrapoints - Well written and meticulous deconstructions of philosophical concepts in media, pop culture and society with a dry wit
Every Frame a Painting - Amazing content on film-making. No longer active, but if you haven’t seen it yet, lucky you, enjoy.
Pop Culture Detective - Interesting meta analyses of popular tropes in pop culture
Because I’m into historical clothing and fashion, Bernadette Banner and Abby Cox both do great videos on costuming, history and creating cool stuff
Trying not to put duplicates:
- ViceGripGrage - finds old shitty cars and gets them running and drives them home
- MightyCarMods - as the name suggests, building/fixing/modifying cars
- Savagegeese - very detailed car reviews, no bullshit
- B1M - talks about mega projects and there issues
- ItchyBoots - Badass motorcyclist that has traveled solo across the world
- shiey - Explores abandoned places, hops trains, insane lack of fear of heights
- The Proper People - also explores abandoned buildings
- Rick Beato - music producer that analyzes songs and talks about various music related topics
in addition to a lot of others already mentioned (there’s a lot of overlap)
History:
culture/politics:
writing/education:
media/ect:
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Tale Foundry (technically about writing fiction, but they also discuss media in general along with its themes, character archetypes, ect. it’s more interesting than it sounds)
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Jacob Geller (mostly video games)
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My Little Thought Tree (also psychology)
I was trying to see if someone else was going to mention F. D.
Shame for yours to be at the bottom; this is a good list of choices, in general. Excellent taste.
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Depends on my mood, and some creators have come and go from my rotation, some random ones: Krystal Kyle and Friends (left leaning politics podcast) Warfronts (more medium form, but I think it’s a good balance) The Right Opinion (long form documentaries, generally around controversial internet figures) Jim Can’t Swim (JCS Criminal Psychology) Fredrick Knudsen (down the rabbit hole series) Karl Jobst (speed running documentaries essentially) Radking (Fallout lore stuff) SmoughTown (Elden Ring lore stuff) Ymfah (ridiculous video game challenges with humorous editing)
There’s tons more ofc
I’ve recently caught up on About Oliver’s second season of Minecraft streams. He’s an astrophysicist who never played Minecraft before 2022 and documented his entire blind playthrough. No reading chat, no googling etc. He only knew that he could get to credits somehow, but didn’t even know how.
I highly recommend the entire playthrough, but there is a 6 hour Compilation of season 1 if you want to catch up to current day. Season 2 is about 40 episodes in, with about 4-5h per episode.
I really like my weekly hour long defense/economics powerpoint from Perun.
I love Technology Connections for an easy, interesting watch. He just explains how appliances work lol
melodysheep - quality animations about universe, earth
thinmatrix - cozy, solo gamedev videos
I don’t watch YouTube to often but I used to like to watch some content from Yes Theory.
My partner watches a few others though, I see her watching Smosh, which sometimes is good, she always watches good mythical stuff, but I am not as much of a fan of them.
I think I avoid YouTube mostly, but if Yes Theory fits your question, I like their underlying message (it started off as a saying Yes to life and taking chances and believing that people were inherently good and try to get communities and the world to come together it seems) and I was actually afraid to say it because I figured someone would come out and tell me how they are actually terrible people somehow. Hopefully not. (Fingers crossed)
This sounds like the premise behind an absolutely delightful 2008 film featuring Jim Carrey and Zooey Deschanel.
Let me lead with this: I’m taking recommendations for spooky channels.
Okay, first of all, how the fuck has nobody mentioned Crime Pays But Botany Doesn’t? [https://youtube.com/@crimepaysbutbotanydoesnt](Crime Pays But Botany Doesn’t)
You get to hear the angriest man alive nerd out about plants.
Someone else mentioned Tasting History with Max Miller and I must second that recommendation, it’s a really good channel if you appreciate Cooking, History, and especially both.
For spooky stuff, I recommend Midnight Broadcast. They basically take 4chan/reddit creepypasta threads, clean it up a bit for the YouTube algo, feed it to an AI reader, and publish them as 20-30 minute videos. There’s also a now dead channel called “Chass” that did the same thing, mixed in a bit of its own lore, and also did a couple of specials like the Epic of MonkeyHumper (11/10 story, possibly the best creepypasta ever published, cannot recommend enough). Though, Chass kept a bit more of the raw 4chan elements than MB does, so be ye warned.
Overanalyzing Avatar does that good 20-min long videos where he just really goes maximum nerd on Avatar The Last Airbender and Korra. It’s passionate, funny, and interesting, and if you even kind of like the cartoons, I highly recommend giving him a try.
I’ll add some more if I think of them
- BizarreBub - 20 mins scary compilations (better than Chills, Nuke5s,Top5s,Dark5 combined imo)
- Chilling Scares - spooky stories, videos
Both guys go straight to the point with no intros and sponsor blocks.
I know bizarrebub, I have to agree with the recommendation, though some of the clips (especially when they involve little kids) can be real stinkers. Will check out chilling scares! Thanks!
For educative scientific YT channels I’d recommend Veritasium, The Action Lab and NileRed to name a few. They produce top quality scientific videos about really interesting phenomenas and experiments. And the best part is they make the concepts simple to understand without the need of a degree or smth lol
A couple fun ones I haven’t seen mentioned:
Myron Cook - Think “the Bob Ross of Geology.” Basically he goes out, finds some rock formation, goes “Huh. Isn’t this cool? What do you think happened?” and walks you through everything dating back to like the formation of the planet. He’s like a teddy bear and his channel is wonderful and fascinating.
Dan Hurd - He’s a dorky gold prospector. He may have caused me to buy a gold panning set.