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.

  • dustycups@aussie.zone
    0·
    12 days ago

    No one seems to have mentionded Steve Mould.
    Super specific topics, interesting (to me anyway) and definitely no slop.

  • Chippys_mittens@lemmy.world
    0·
    13 days ago

    Simon Whistler is the man. He runs a bunch of YouTube channels with the same basic idea. He has a script about a topic written by a person then he reads it on camera with plenty of his own additions. My favorite channels are “into the shadows”, “casual criminalist” " megaprojects" and “side projects” but I think he has a few more. Each one is themed differently but all are good, interesting, human made and educational. Tons of content on each channel.

    • TurboWafflz@lemmy.world
      0·
      13 days ago

      Has his content gotten more accurate? I stopped watching him after he claimed that the cell signal meter on your phone doesn’t measure the signal strength but actually the distance to the nearest tower

  • IntrovertTurtle@lemmy.zip
    0·
    13 days ago

    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.

  • Obi@sopuli.xyz
    0·
    11 days ago

    There’s a million great recommendations in this thread already so I don’t feel the need to add, but I wanted to chime in that the type of channel that would just use AI slides/“footage” today was always around but were just doing lazy work instead. Also a rule of thumb that seems to kinda work so far is if it’s also on Nebula then it’s usually pretty well made and researched.

    • anon6789@lemmy.world
      0·
      13 days ago

      I’m on a Nebula guest pass this week someone generously gave me when I talked about having a hard time finding AI things.

      It’s a very stark contrast scrolling through the 2 feeds next to each other!

      Nebula has a more Fediverse feel. I don’t believe it has any kind of real recommendation algorithm, it just has a few suggested categories, like this is Women’s Month, so they highlight female creators. Less people contributing, but every video looks watchable even if it’s not something I have interest in. The main issue I’ve had is getting used to a more Netflix looking system to find videos, and just the fact since everything looks interesting, I haven’t actually watched much since it’s stuff I want to watch when I can actually pay attention instead of it just being moreso background noise. For the $60 a year or whatever it is, it is looking quite tempting.

      Scrolling YouTube next to it feels much more like looking at Facebook. Clear algorithm based feed. Lots of mental junk food type recommendations. Real content looks the same as AI. I’m on premium and still have to hear the in-video ad reads. Much more variety (almost no electronic music production or synth type stuff I could find on Nebula, not much on animation, for example) but you have to wade through a lot of crud to find the good stuff.

  • snoons@lemmy.caEnglish
    0·
    13 days ago

    Not sure if these are what you’re looking for, but:

    • Dr. Becky

    • What’s Going On With Shipping?

    • Not Just Bikes

    • Sampson Boat Co.

    • Primitive Technology

    • Bad Obsession Motorsport

    • Practical Engineering

    • B1M

    • Jay and Mark

    • Florian Gadsby

    There are also channels that are focused on the war in Ukraine and related international shenanigans (in order of avg. video length):

    • Perun

    • Denys Davydov

    • Reporting from Ukraine

    • Suchomimus (poor chap made a channel to nerd out about dinosaurs, then the Russians attacked…)

    Also check out ytch.xyz; It serves videos from a curated list of channels such that it behaves like cable television.

    Also also check out nebula.tv if you can afford it.

  • spectrums_coherence@piefed.socialEnglish
    0·
    13 days ago

    Veritasium

    Fren

    Johnny Harris

    Compterphile

    3blue1brown

    tldrNews (several channel each for different region)

    RealLifeLore

    Money and Macro (actual economist, not finance bro)

      • spectrums_coherence@piefed.socialEnglish
        0·
        12 days ago

        Unlike fern and tldrnews, I don’t think they declared no AI, but I feel most of there animation seems to involve a lot of human labors, at least on top of AI.

        They have also never declared the use of AI either, so I guess I don’t know for sure.