I love long-form videos that tell information and stories. Documentaries about most any topics, especially ones that last an hour or more, are my bread and butter. But when I’m using YouTube on my TV, I can’t tell from thumbnails what the quality of a channel is. Sometimes I find gold, but other times it’s obvious they’re using an AI voice over or AI imagery and I immediately turn it off. I’m so tired of trudging through the slop, even though it’s just beginning.
So for now, I figure I’ll check with y’all - do you have any preferred/recommended channels that make the sort of video I’m looking for, that are still human-made? I’d love to hear about them.
Historia Civilis https://youtube.com/@historiacivilis
Cambrian chronicles https://youtube.com/@cambrianchronicles
This is the best, most comprehensive list I’ve found: https://www.clicknourishment.com/
Looks to be broken for me?
Still loading fine for me. Have a VPN or adblock enabled?
VPN cause UK.
Ooh, just reopened it and now it’s fine
No one seems to have mentionded Steve Mould.
Super specific topics, interesting (to me anyway) and definitely no slop.Usually not as long, but the PBS stuff and Dr Becky are pretty good for astrophysics.
Joe Scott is good for this.
I mean, the easiest way would be to go for organizations over individuals…
Like PBS, or https://www.youtube.com/@TheInstituteOfArtAndIdeas/videos
If you’re just watching random videos, there’s gonna be a bunch of slop
Kyle Hill, Kurzgesagt - In a nutshell (they have channels in many languages) and fern come to mind
doesnt kurz use AI in some of his presentation, and tried to justify why hes using as not 'actual slop"
Depending on which language you speak I can recommend Arte, a French-German cooperation.
A few channels I like that I think should fit. AFAIK none of them use AI whatsoever.
Stefan Milo (Prehistory/Archaeology)
Told in Stone (Ancient History)
World of Antiquity (Ancient History)
The Pharao Nerd (History)
Trey the Explainer (History and random topics)
Anton Petrov (Space and Science)
Big Joel (Culture/Media)
STRANGE ÆONS (Internet culture and random stuff)
SmarterEveryDay is cool, it’s a former NASA engineer just explaining cool shit. I’m a fan of his ‘how do helicopters work’ deep dive, and the world’s greatest archer videos.
Veritassium is kinda the same thing, though I don’t know his stuff quite as well.
eh, I’ve stopped watching him in the past couple years.
between the trend of needing to go bigger to satisfy the algorithm, the religious stuff, and fellating the US military, the content just isn’t worth it
the world’s greatest archer videos.
Lana!
…LANA!
…LANAAAA!!!
(wait, I think I misunderstood) ;-)
getting more and more turned off by smartereverydays increase in religious bullshit in the videos
There is this super cool video series debunking some of the horse shit Destin has been saying about creationism. Would recommend: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLInNVsmlBUlSjLSj9yGEKphF0RYRYBlXg
I haven’t watched much of his new stuff, so idk anything about that. I do know a lot of his fans were semi-upset about his increase in use of the slow-mo, high-speed camera footage.
Tech Ingredients - DIY-ing machines that seem way more complicated than they actually are
AvE - tool teardowns with the kind of crude humour you only get from being a spannerjockey
Greenhill Forge - Chap that builds homesteading/self sufficiency/off-grid equipment, brilliant at explaining the underlying principles without any jargon
Maximus Ironthumper - An off-grid living guy that’s currently building a portable pipe organ in an old Zil truck (and refurbishing said truck in the process)
Styropyro - Master of the question “How dangerous can I make this high voltage device/ Laser without dying?”
Nilered /Nileblue - A mad scientist with the budget to do things like ‘making a bacon flavoured apple’ just for the hell of it
Dankpods - A channel with the widest variety of music tech and creator of the “Nugget dip” - a series about looking at second hand MP3/phone/early 00’s tech that ended up in second hand stores
Alexander the ok - Highly researched and well written videos on topics such as “What is the dumbest nuclear bomb ever put into service?”
Just to name a few off the dome in a variety of Science/STEM topics
Check out Simon Whistler and his team’s channels. Tons of informative stuff and I think they make a sizable portion of all YouTube content lol
The Whistlerverse is just too full of inaccuracies to be a good source for infotainment
Agreed. I used to follow his channel until he spoke a hot a topic I actually knew about beforehand and realized bro isn’t great at reaserxh or critical thinking. He just parrots whatever Google tells him.
How so? Not doubting, I just hadn’t heard anything before.
Well I discovered it when I saw there was so many channels of his that talked about the similar topics, it felt off somehow so I started to google some of the stuff he talked about. It wasn’t necessarily wrong, but inaccurate enough that when you watch a lot of his stuff the image of what happened will be skewed. It has been years since I did it so I don’t have exact details for you, but it shouldn’t be too hard to replicate (if google/google.scholar hasn’t degraded too much).
Cathode Ray Dude he does 1 hour plus videos on the history of a niche product or technology. He just did one that is 2+ hours on how they film tvs for movies. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qicQUvSUbPM
If you like long, human-made, interesting but also a bit leftfield documentaries, you could do a lot worse than Jon Bois.
Example - a four part series about the history of the telegraph, told through an extended metaphor involving the two main characters in 90s sitcom, Home Improvement.
Highly recommended, as is his other stuff. He has a couple of deep dives into the weird histories of the Atlanta Falcons and the Minnesota Vikings that are also well worth watching
Time Ghost’s channels are, IMO, the gold standard for history content. Its very in-depth, but they’ve so-far covered WW1 on their The Great War channel, WW2 on their World War 2 channel, and their current focus is on the Korean War on their channel, The Forgotten War by Indy Neidell.
All of their channels focus on covering these time periods chronologically - usually one episode a week, covering that week’s events. Most of these individual episodes are 10-20 minutes long, but again, they release a new one weekly, so it will take a long time to catch up. As well as these weekly episodes, they also create some specials covering specific topics, and they produce the occational long-form documentary, such as their 12 hour long video on Pearl Harbor or their 24 hour long video on D-Day.
Time Ghost is amazing. None of it based on Internet searches, all based on books, books and more books.
