Ask Lemmy

Folding Ideas is a favorite of mine.

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I love Star Trek, but don't want to watch the modern Alex kurtzman garbage, so they take the bullet for me.

I'm also not a movie guy, so watching their reviews/analysis while playing Minecraft is more entertaining than the movies they talk about.

Best of the worst is them watching B and direct to video movies that i wouldn't otherwise know about.

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.

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.

Montemayor

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 is 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.

EDIT: Oh, right. Someone else mentioned Primitive Technology, which I would definitely second. Has a guy go out in the woods with just his shorts and basically manufacture a lot of basic technology from the ground up. Does have subtitles, but no narration or speech. The practical use of what he does is probably limited, but I found it fascinating. I remember that this was very popular for a while on Reddit.

I'm hooked on Corridor Crew. They review and explain good and bad cgi/vfx in shows and movies.

If you're interested or curious about music theory (even if you don't know much about it), I recommend Charles Cornell. Here's one of him talking about Pure Imagination.

I like Dime Store Adventures for history trivia and exploration, mostly USA focused.

I watch a few different channels regularly. Here are a few of my favorites

Cecilia Blomdahl lives in the Arctic Circle/northern Norway and has lots of adventures and videos her day to day life in a really interesting way.

Also some Brits who have been renovating abandoned chateaus in France called Escape the Dream and a new one called Mucky Mansion are great escapism

Brain Pilot makes some good videos recapping a few shows i enjoy

I have a few classic youtubers I still watch from back in the day Safiya Nygard and Grace Helbig, for some beauty/crazy fashion/cooking stuff

If you want a sane political/comedy channel, Trae Crowder, the Liberal Redneck is fantastic. In that same vein, Some More News does fantastic deep dives in lots of political and social issues focused mostly on the US

Living big in a tiny house is really interesting seeing cool tiny homes around the world

Takis shelter is a channel from an amazing man who runs a sanctuary for animals in Crete and is a literal saint

For videogame essays, my two faves are Jacob Geller and Powerpak

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

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.

Hakim, Mental Outlaw, Second Though , Alice Capelle, The Hated One

My recommendation for travel would be 'Bald and Bankrupt', in particular I loved his whole Russian/Ex-Soviet Union series.

For documentaries, I do enjoy the 'Down the Rabbit Hole' documentaries. They did a great one on Terry A. Davis a few years back

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

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!)

Hochelaga, Horses, Real Science, ContraPoints, Knowing better

For history, I really like Premodernist. It's just a history professor telling you history. It's great because he's a good storyteller and he actually knows the subject.

Vice grip garage.

I enjoy efap which is probably the longest form, especially Mauler, the others are generally better in a mixed crowd. It's movies and Internet drama for the most part.

MLiG