thread of youtubers whomst are not terrible

a place to talk Contrapoints, Lindsay Ellis, and anyone else anyone cares to recommend or complain about, prompted by the former's newfound level of popularity, but pls feel free to talk about any cool #content providers, not just politics folx

thx comrade

also there was some discussion on the second thoughts thread of Natalie being problematic in some way but I couldn't really follow it, so pls hash that out here if you are so inclined

I've heard good things abou hbomberguy but can't really bring myself to click on someone who uses formulations like "x is terrible and here's why", regardless of what the x is (well, maybe if it's capitalism).

hbomberguy is tight with the other two youtubers already mentioned so he tends to get lumped in as well, but my big problem with his videos is they're too damn long. if you care about the politics of gaming you could do a lot worse and he is quite funny and charming at times, but he could really take a page from Contra when it comes to concision

For anyone who's curious about Lindsay Ellis, her three-parter on the Hobbit films is a bit of a form-buster when it comes to YouTube video essays, particularly for the way it blossoms from an essay into an actual documentary partway through

danielfromsl has popped up on ILG plenty but I think he potentially has mass appeal. Kind of the Nathan Fielder/Eric Andre of online gaming, reliably hilarious.

Kinda wish this thread was a video game-free zone but whatever, that's just me. Carry on.

I wish that too, but it's kind of an impossible wish given how everyone plays video games obsessively

Anyway, I have lots of quasi-viable options for this thread but I don't know which ones to foreground

I'll say that Jon Bois >>>>>>>

Well, NB, the only other game-related videos I really watch are Skate 3 glitch compilations so clearly I'm mostly just in it for the lols.

how did I not know that Jon Bois has an entire channel

speaking of which, let's begin the actual youtubing with the best video on youtube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DK2anpoKeNM

(although really his Pretty Good and Chart Party series are MANDATORY viewing)

Stevem does pretty good videos about Japanese music (from Jazz to City Pop to Japanese Hip-Hop) and the more respectable end of anime (Miyazaki etc.)

Vinilteca is good if you want to get a grasp on the Brazilian music canon but it's in Portuguese.

Strictly Dumpling is my guilty pleasure food go-to. It's pretty vapid, dude doesn't have a ton of charisma and the music's terrible BUT he does seem to know his shit and has a stomach of steal, so seeing him eat prodigious amounts of grub throughout South East Asia is pretty entertaining. I'm sure accounts like that are a dime a dozen but this one's at least well edited and doesn't have too many calls to action.

incidentally, since you mentioned calls to action, if anyone doesn't know what that means, the most recent Lindsay Ellis video is a meta meditation on the youtuber business model that gets into all this stuff and it's a good overview of the madnesses inherent to the platform

Yeah, that's where I learned the term :)

I go back and forth on whether to just block Youtube entirely. As much as I like Contrapoints and free music, it's a site that activates my worst internet compulsions. Like she put it in the CTH interview, "Youtube forced me to watch it."

Not crazy about how this conflates Disney and Warner Bros but whatever, I guess both could be equally restrictive in their own ways:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8-09DbxHBU

Primitive Technology, in which a man makes all kinds of things using pretty much only what he finds in the woods:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P73REgj-3UE

You Suck at Cooking, a fine decoction of deadpan self-deprecation and sheer absurdity:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHF2hDuH5HE

Michael New is a guy who teaches music theory & composition basics in a very accessible way:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBhJsShMF2g

scott brown carpentry & the MRE man

I assume people know about Simone Giertz and her intentionally-shitty robots but if not well then there you go.

Someone tried to get me into asmr videos because he thought it would totally be my thing. IT IS TOTALLY NOT MY THING.

I like this funny South African woman who does car reviews that contain some great real life info and also bad singing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCw6N5iNV8g (that statium is in Cape Town, by the way)

http://www.youtube.com/user/julietmcguire/videos

cool channel having weirdos guide you through their tiny weirdo houses
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXRJE2caPNY

in a way, it's anti-youtuber in that it's more errol morris than the "me-me-me-me i have a take on everything!" approach that youtube seems to encourage. speaking of which, I think errol morris's son has a channel where it's just him taking a bunch of drugs.

you suck at cooking was a great call

oh yeah scott brown carpentry

kiwami japan's latest bestrides youtube like a colossus

Polygon did a list of best video essays of 2018, with the usual suspects (ContraPoints, Linsday Ellis) present. The last one about a scene from Tarkovsky's Nostalgia felt to me like a bunch of interesting ideas that never really came together; now I'm in the madness of the two hour video about parasocial relationships.

lol, forgot to link: https://www.polygon.com/2018/12/28/18156334/best-youtube-video-essays-2018-watch

Noah Caldwell-Gervais deserves a mention.

Ostensibly long, literate and humane retrospective reviews of video games by someone who toiled in pizza delivery, but he's also adopted a vagabond lifestyle out of a restored VW bus with his new wife, and his video essays on their journeys through the US West put the rest of his work in perspective.

Todd in the Shadows reviews pop music, and recently, 1 hit wonders. Wouldn't be surprised in the slightest to find he lurks here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwl9xmM3IuQ&t=758s

I watched some of the parasocial relationships series. V interesting but yeah crazy long.

todd in the shadows does lurk here or at least has before. one of his videos directly cited an ilm thread in the description (a compilation of songs that actually stop when the singer says stop, like the ilm thread on the same subject).

found the parasocial relationship video basically unwatchable. it was heavily rt'd by that whole circle of #content creators (a comically large proportion of ppl on that list are friends and frequent collaborators -- the fellow who wrote the list might as well have had it served up to him by algorithmically generated recommendations) so i tried to watch it around the time it came out. her intro video on the subject was good/interesting but the rest was just tediously extended to an absurd degree not at all justified by the insight provided in the commentary or the ridiculous number of clips of bo burnham. i don't think i would have even found it necessary if i were stoned.

anyway that circle of creators is sometimes informally referred to as 'leftube' or similar by its audience due to i guess being leftists and/or critical of the worryingly visible far-right factions of the site. i am personally very unimpressed by this collective's obvious awareness of, and apparent lack of interest in directly addressing, a phenomenon that any leftist viewing them will have noticed: virtually all of these creators are white, and given that most if not all of them rely heavily on cultural touchstones and memes to illustrate their broader theses, the narrowness of the cultural literacy that's evident in their work (this includes both lindsay ellis and todd in the shadows btw) will serve as a significant handicap to creating a space on youtube representing their political leanings that does not also reproduce racial separation and hierarchy. contemporary online meme culture is spawned in enormous part within black culture, so their utter cluelessness about, say, the work of any currently active black musician who isn't favorably covered on pitchfork and explicitly 'political' enough to make sense to them, coupled with their inability to include anyone who does have this level of cultural literacy in their frequent collaborative efforts is disappointing to say the least.

when this obvious phenomenon was brought up on twitter, the response from these creators was merely to retweet contrapoints's quote-tweet of a user's list of left-leaning creators of color along with the message "let's make leftube more representative!" or somesuch. meanwhile i am not especially hopeful that they won't continue to collaborate exclusively with one another, continue to congregate only with one another at fan meet-and-greets, #content creator conferences and the like, etc. etc. maybe one of them will retweet kat blaque or the1janitor once every month or something.

i have unsubscribed from both of the 'leftube' creators to whom i'd previously subscribed (contrapoints and hbomberguy). while i will probably continue to enjoy their work when i do come across it, i would rather spend whatever time i use actively seeking out content looking for creators who are not creating networks (because these creators are not just creating content, but networks of content!) that are so insular.

that's a fair criticism. I would hope that in time the network becomes less insular but at the same time I'm happy to throw some $$ at anyone fighting the RW content machine and doing so in a way that's engaging

this has 1.1k *replies* so far

Have my videos helped to change your viewpoint (about the Alt-Right, trans issues, whatever else)? Are you willing to talk to a journalist about it? Respond to this tweet if so! 🙏🙏🙏

— Natalie Wynn 🦋 (@ContraPoints) January 10, 2019

I'm a bit less fond of Hbomber because I think he makes less effort to be approachable to the opposition, very different from Contra and Shaun the skull.

learned a lot from the latest Contra video

has anyone else noticed a marked uptick in complaining about the garbage YouTube recommendations?

and speaking of Hbomberguy, he's currently like 27 hours into a Twitch charity stream for Mermaids and is up to $100k, so I think it's safe to say the community is growing

Retail Archaeology
http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCR2LNeZSqINp0WTd_eWCIGg

Dead malls, zombie retail stores, etc

Harris is still going, $133k / 33hrs

youtube's sidebar recommendations are inexcusably shit and compromised and i feel guilty about continuing to use youtube knowing sidebar recs still exist but honestly i find youtube too useful to seriously consider quitting.

hey so @AOC HAS JOINED THE STREAM GO WATCH AND DONATE https://t.co/Fz8plugN5y

— Mary Ellen (@alissacaliente) January 20, 2019

I just caught the very end. Crazy.

I can't see it well on my phone, what's the $$ up to?

Over $221k. Since I clicked a few minutes ago they've made about five thousand.

I don't feel old until I see how popular twitch streams are.

I wonder whether AOC is a gamer.

I would say not because it is a total time suck and she seems actually really productive.

Good enough for me.

Here’s @aoc talking about how Nintendo 64 was the best system. She’s on @twitch helping to raise money for trans kids. pic.twitter.com/cJIfUif1mv

— New Super Blood Wolf Moon Bros. U Deluxe (@GenePark) January 20, 2019

Loved the Youtube episode, Simon. You each found your way to a different circle of hell.

Ha, thanks! We suffered for your entertainment.

Ash Sarkar interviewed Harris

https://novaramedia.com/2019/01/23/donkey-kong-is-beautiful-ash-meets-hbomberguy/

https://11foot8.com/speeding-semi-gets-smashed-up-at-the-11foot8-bridge/

this one is great

i saw this a few months ago, fuming

The city of Durham, North Carolina is finally raising an 11-foot-8 bridge nicknamed "The Can Opener" for shaving the tops off trucks in more than a decade's worth of viral videos. Its many fans—myself included—are mourning the loss: https://t.co/YMNL27Sgsi

— Miles Klee (@MilesKlee) October 23, 2019

deactivating your twitter account is good

natalie is smart and clever and persuasive and i'm sure she makes a lot of very good points, depending on your perspective "cancelling" can either be a howling irrational mob or the intersectional voice of marginalized peoples, it's just, i don't know, there are limits to discourse, there are limits to explaining things, there are limits to how many times i can hear someone patiently explain how i've completely misunderstood them and how unfairly i am judging them/taking them out of context. it just reminds me of all those times j.k. rowling insisted she wasn't a terf but just clicked "like" on all those transphobic tweets by "accident", and by and large, you know, it seemed like cis people believed her, and then last week everybody was all like "OH MY GOD J.K. ROWLING IS A TRANSPHOBE WHO KNEW?!?!?"

i can't speak to anything but my own experience. maybe there are trans communities where people are all "oh, cool, another contrapoints video!" like i used to be instead of "oh, god, another contrapoints video", which has, over the past year, become the dominant reaction to her videos from the trans communities i hang out in.

they locked my twitter account cos I told rupert murdoch I hope he dies this year

he should know that you want him to die, immortality is a huge burden

Damn that would have been a more productive way to cap off my twitter career

folks, folks, there are finer things

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNE2y1gOVvE

second one just went up too

I will never know if Contrapoints is good or bad because fuck watching an hour+ youtube video.

I like her videos a lot but I made it about 40 minutes into this one and decided I just don't care. "Cancel culture" is for people in their 20s with way too much free time. Hearing about it is like hearing about something that was discussed for 17000 posts on Reddit one day. None of those people will ever accomplish anything in their worthless lives, because they're...on Reddit all goddamn day.

(N.B.: even the 40 minutes I "watched" were as background audio while writing.)

concision does not seem to be the praxis of "influencers" on youtube

lol, i post something here and then read like the third post here

"hbomberguy is tight with the other two youtubers already mentioned so he tends to get lumped in as well, but my big problem with his videos is they're too damn long. if you care about the politics of gaming you could do a lot worse and he is quite funny and charming at times, but he could really take a page from Contra when it comes to concision

― wayne trotsky (Simon H.)"

only thing that would be funnier is if hbomberguy was now doing 10 minute videos

I give Contrapoints more slack regarding long videos than most other youtubers because she makes a conscious effort to make her videos visually and dramatically interesting. But yeah, hour plus is a bit much.

Very proud that out of the three ppl who gave GeoWizard and mate lifts in the first video two were portuguese.

My belief is that, in the long run, there are no Youtubers who are not terrible. That communicating, or attempting to communicate, on Youtube, on Twitter, on Facebook, will inevitably make you a worse person. My belief is that there is a sort of Gresham's Law of Discourse - bad speech drives out good. My belief is that there is, in fact, "bad speech" - abuse, threats, bullying - and that its presence creates an emotional environment that renders all other considerations irrelevant.

none of the videos posted in this thread contain abuse, threats, or bullying that I can recall (I guess the geowizard guy is a little suspicious towards the farmer population)

I guess what Jon Bois does to sports statistics could be considered a form of abuse, but strictly self-abuse

last i heard youtube still had a comments section

so does the NYT. who cares?

Yeah, you'll get no argument from me that YT comments are on average worse than in most other internet places and that the platform as a whole is mostly a force of evil, but the idea that it forcibly makes you a worse person feels like it's making it too much of a monolith; there are innumerable channels that're just people nerding out over their favourite hobbies or esoteric interests, and there's not much bullying or abuse happening on them, not even in the comments.

I have literally never purposely read a YT comment other than the "pinned" one left by the channel (with the exception of the grand old Sad YouTube collection). They're very easy not to read. You can even get a browser extension to hide them forever if you like!

Sure, but if you're an *ahem* content creator I think you're more likely than not to read the comments. But those don't have to be a trash fire, is the thing.

the nyt also makes you a worse person

look, i don't know, maybe you can be like techmoan and post videos about nixie tubes and still be a healthy positive person, but if you go on youtube and talk about incels or the alt right or any of that shit that's going to cause problems for you, in the same way that doing one of those shit jobs as a "content moderator" on facebook is going to cause problems for you.

sure, i have browser extensions to hide comments, to hide those awful fucking videos youtube recommends you, and as a result i can still to some degree watch stuff on there, even though i know i probably should stop doing that.

i believe the deliberate infliction of emotional trauma and perpetuation of cycles of abuse is a key driver of "engagement" in the internet content industry's core business model.

I did watch the entire Contrapoints video although after a certain point it got to be a bit of a personal endurance test like the time I tried and failed to listen to nothing but Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavilion for two weeks or whatever. She made many good points and I get that part of the point was just the overwhelming nature of what it's like to be on the receiving end of the cancel barrage (via reading tweets about her for 10 minutes straight, etc.), but maybe she could have found a way to shave an hour off somewhere.

One thing that is going to haunt my nightmares is the word "truscum", the concept behind which I'm still a little fuzzy on, but which nevertheless made me shudder.

I like her videos a lot but I made it about 40 minutes into this one and decided I just don't care. "Cancel culture" is for people in their 20s with way too much free time. Hearing about it is like hearing about something that was discussed for 17000 posts on Reddit one day. None of those people will ever accomplish anything in their worthless lives, because they're...on Reddit all goddamn day.

― shared unit of analysis (unperson), Thursday, January 2, 2020 7:40 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I made it 20ish minutes in? Once I realized how long it was I decided I needed to get to bed. Anyway, despite your hand-waving as a young people Reddit thing I've definitely seen the phenomenon she laid out happen here on ilx, too.

Also yes some people are on Reddit all day, some people are on ilx all day, twitter whatever. I'm not sure any of us can say we're above having our faces constantly glued to internet conversations in general.

The Lockdown 23and1 guy is good on Prison stuff too, interviews a lot of people who've been inside in various states. Not quite sure why I'm drawn to this stuff

I mean, the "carceral state" in the US is fucking huge and so often subject to cartoonish / not credible representation, so it seems like a pretty normal thing to be curious about imo

carceral culture

This Contra video is mainly confirming for me that I must stay away from both Youtube and Twitter.

Foresty Forest's videos about his living in a converted minivan are wonderful. I'm especially enjoying the more recent ones covering the depths of Canadian winter where he heads out hiking and biking in the snowy wilds alongside talking about the practicalities of his minivan life, but it's worth going back a year or so and watching through them all to see the conversion and development of the van and all the wee niggles he irons out along the way.

http://www.youtube.com/user/forestyforest/

I though it was a channel I picked up from this thread, but I can't spot it here previously.

I'm down for possumtubers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRIVTEBaLkA

just saw the contrapoints video

full stan; all hail

possum psychic!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kznj1NZN90A

Anxiety porn

^this is deeply satisfying

Apparently he has an awful reputation with other restorers and conservators but it's still fascinating.

awful as a restorer or as a person/business? I mean I know <zero abt restoration but I can't imagine someone being more thorough, precautious etc.

every person on youtube must be cancelled

As a restorer. His methods are (supposedly) pretty destructive.

what is this person's reputation

https://images-cdn.9gag.com/photo/az9v7bp_460s.jpg

appearing pretty good at something to a layman. while providing a good narrative, makes for good videos

tbh his retouching could be with shit paint that melts the canvas a day later and we’d be none the wiser

surveillance camera man has a new travel channel...and it's pretty much what you expect
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOB7wXNwjvo

Rescreened my favorite Jomboy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iU-ESpiwV4o

Real life GeoGuesser from thread favourite GeoWizard, excellent stuff!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqe5CjHRmMY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19KbrTpgiEM

Perhaps not as awesome for those not of my background, but I loved this silent tour through a recently closed Portuguese-American restaurant with Fado music in the background

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogvT7hlOJ5Y

TEH ALGORITHMS took me to a video by someone calling himself "The History Guy". slightly craggy older white man with a bowtie, probably thinks quite highly of Bill Nye. the sort of white dude i wanted to be, probably, or at least reminds me of some of my friends who i haven't really talked to since i deactivated my social media.

anyway, i took a look at the stuff he was talking about... he does this strain of history about the things that i find myself reading when i browse wikipedia, sort of an open-minded white man's history canon for people who are tired of fucking Nazis all the time. he does social history, non-military history, although of course he does have your standard video on Able Archer.

of the ones i checked out the one i liked most was his video on Yip Harburg.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rF2vzftzp7k

he says at the end that it's not about the politics - that's kind of the modus operandi of such people, they want to sound Authoritative and Objective and of course he is as far as that goes but for someone like me, for whom There Is Nothing But The Sociopolitical Context, i think you can tell a lot about someone by what they talk about and how they talk about it. he's obviously really enthusiastic about harburg and it's infectious.

i don't think there are any Good Youtubers because Youtube structurally precludes "goodness", but i enjoyed watching his video on yip harburg and i suspect i would enjoy hanging out with this guy.

conner o'malley has gone nuclear

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZeQMxy-Uf3M

I visited the same area. Video is accurate