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Farya Faraji! He got really popular with his video on Orientalist music vs actual Middle Eastern music: https://youtu.be/LR511iAedYU
Really funny, clever, passionate, dedicated to his craft (the intersection of music and anthropology). I almost never like video essays but his are actually good and actually engaging. His music is great too and i love just he includes detailed descriptions about them.
Man's channel deserves more love.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Big cooking video person here
J Kenji Lopez Alt is my muse. I will not hear anything against him.
Chef John/Food Wishes - He makes some great old school recipe videos, just no bullshit 8-10 minute videos walking you through the recipe steps. Also has great puns.
America's Test Kitchen Has a bunch of filler videos, but I really like What's Eating Dan and Techniquely with Lan Lam, just very knowledgeable chefs.
f4micom makes cool videos about niche topics in consumer tech and gaming. lately she's also been getting into maker/DIY things
I like introvertedmadness for making rant videos about his life that are often relatable to me. he also makes videos with social commentary sometimes; these are more entertaining and suitable for general audiences, and though he can come off as a clueless lib, he has the right spirit
I like Nimi Nightmare, she’s nice and chill, 
, and just some comfy vibes.
Nyanners - she’s a gremlin, not awful, just a cringe streamer.
Trey The Explainer - good quality highly informational videos about anthropology, archaeology, and paleontology.
Benjamin Magnus, a streamer who plays both some niche games and popular ones. Some games I don't see many other people play. Xenonauts 2, Rule the Waves 3, Ultimate General: Civil War, and Hearts of Iron 3 being my favorite to watch. He also does Rimworld, Project Zomboid, and other games, but the games mentioned are my favorite to watch.
It's a livestream (on Twitch but restreamed over to YT too), so it's longform content and requires some attention span to watch.
Random ones I like:
HubNut - Reviews and vlogs about old cars.
JaredAF - Videos about pistols and shooting sport without tacticool nonsense.
Tony Zaret - Weird comedy skits parodying internet culture.
My oshi, Haruka Karibu has finally returned to streaming after a long mental health hiatus.
She's also gotten two new chibi avatars!
Ææugh!
Oh good for her!
If I try to restrict to the smaller channels (some of these are quite big anyhow, but whatever):
Kaze Emanuar
Mario 64 modding focus, with coding deep dives
https://www.youtube.com/@KazeN64
Decino
Classic Doom content, with coding deep dives
https://www.youtube.com/@decino
Timbah.On.Toast
Music and culture focused video essays
https://www.youtube.com/@TimbahOnToast
José
Musings on historical sitcoms and conservative media
https://www.youtube.com/@JoseBird
Cass Eris
Scathing book reviews of pop psychology
https://www.youtube.com/@CassEris
Dr. Fatima
Astrophysics, Space, and Politics
https://www.youtube.com/@dr.fatima
Simon Roper
Linguistics and other stuff
https://www.youtube.com/@simonroper9218
Clickspring
Precision hand manufacturing
https://www.youtube.com/@Clickspring
Acorn to Arabella
Wooden sailboat build, and now sailing
I like Scaredy Cats. It's Thought Slime's other channel focused mostly on horror movies, from the high art ones to the cheesy, B horror ones. In fact, I'd probably say there's more of the latter than the former.
They try to keep is non-political, but every now and then anti-capitalist themes slip in to their movie reviews, which I'm just fine with.
she visits interesting houses - https://www.youtube.com/@kirstendirksen
Big fan of her. Some videos are rich people wankery, but a lot of them are forward-thinking examples of ecologically sound housing and/or cool community building projects.
yeah, not all of them are hits but eg the one about the italian immigrant guy who excavated a series of caves and underground courtyards in the desert? or the two videos about houses built inside greenhouses? hell yeah
This one about the semi-indoor village is my favorite: https://youtu.be/EzKSKqjEmDA
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I'm amazed it's not been mentioned here yet - Luna oi! is a very cool socialist Vietnamese channel. Her videos are both fun and informative, and good for getting a non-western take on so many things.
Smight is mostly a twitch streamer, but he posts all his stuff to YouTube. He's the creator of the Arcade Pit, a internet gameshow where contestants play old games answer trivia and generally have fun with games.
Super friendly to the trans community, the pit crew recently hosted a marathon to raise money for trans causes, and many of the guests on the show are often trans as well, with the co-host being Emily Aster an awesome trans lady.
So tune in every Sunday evening at 8pm EST for the arcade pit live. Smight has not missed a show in over 15 years or something insane. His channel is twitch.tv/smight
LGR and Angela Collier. I hardly use youtube except to watch jerma vods
I like the singer Scarlet Slaadek.
This channel is very good: https://youtu.be/aVwxzDHniEw
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I still, unsurprisingly, like the kids in hololive and holostars. They're all a bunch of bright and talented, essentially, theater kids.
I also like false edge hema and dequitem because it's fun watching large adult children beat the shit out of each other with metal sticks fancily.
I also enjoy natural habitat, under studio hub, fire department chronicles, and some others
Cathode Ray Dude- mentioned elsewhere as well, generally cool dude
Tech Tangents - haven’t seen mentioned, another old tech guy that stays in his lane politically and makes cool content
Technology Connections - my favorite “well technically” nerd
VWestlife - a gem of youtube, untarnished by advertisers or thr algorithm
Dr. Angela Collier - Smart Science Dr who makes cool commie adjacent videos
Ethoslab - my one parasocial relationship is this reclusive canadian minecrafter who uploads once a month and I mostly catch on other peoples server streams
Robot Cantina - old dude that’s making diesel electric batter vehicles out of his garage for cheap, really cool electrical and mechanical engineering going on with just one dude, fabrication as well.
Just cause you mentioned Tech Tangents, some more cool retro computing channels: MichaelMJD, Usagi Electric, Action Retro, Curious Marc, Adrian's Digital Basement, NCommander
Ancient Americas is a really good channel that covers pre Columbian cultures in the Americas
Big ups to this one! My favorite videos are on the Calusa in Florida and the nations of the PNW. These are both high-quality materialist history that demonstrate how fundamentally divergent some North American societies were from the old world developmental path. Both of these built complex class societies with only marginal use of agriculture, instead developing marine/freshwater resources to the point that they achieved the material abundance necessary for higher levels of social organization. It's absolutely fascinating stuff and has no real parallels outside of North America that I'm aware of.
I found YouTube links in your comment. Here are links to the same videos on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Link 1:
Link 2:
I would imagine many people here who watch Youtube are already familiar with Folding Ideas, at least from his video about NFTs. He is imo the best video essayist by a wide mile.
Then there's Jenny Nicholson, her videos are hit or miss in the sense that I really don't care about most topics she talks about, but I find even those videos engaging and when she does talk about an interesting topic it's an all-timer for me.
I watched all four hours of her video about the Star Wars hotel. Damn, that was almost a year ago and apparently she hasn't posted a video since.
She posts more videos on her patreon, IIRC like 2-3x what's on her channel now. She doesn't advertise it much, probably because of how rarely she makes videos lol.
Tom 7 is peak comedy for computer scientists (not to be confused with tech bros) with a penchant for deadpan delivery.
I wouldn't be surprised if he posts a new video within the next few months since SIGBOVIK passed last month and he has a paper in the proceedings.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I like Cathode Ray Dude too, he's a good talker who can make anything sound interesting and he has ”I hate capitalism and I'm not here to get sponsorships, I just want to share what I'm up to for your entertainment and education.” in his bio and that pride flag VHS case in the background of all his videos.
LGR makes similar content and at this point I appreciate every YouTube person who hasn't turned into a chud, started making algorithm pandering content or both.
Those are all the same reasons I’ve been watching his stuff for years, and VWestlife even longer.
VWestlife even still makes most of his videos in like 480p with Windows Movie Maker and all in one take, he is incredibly true to how he wants to do things and I love that.
Clint (LGR) has been around for 19 years, and the quality has been consistently good across that time.
He made a video last year celebrating 15 years of LGR, so I guess he considers 2009 and the first videos labelled as LGR the time he really started on YouTube. I've been watching him pretty much since the beginning, when his channel was still technically called phreakindee, lol.
Yeah, his videos are still great, I'm glad he made it through the hurricane okay.
SuperGreatFriend is a fairly high effort gaming channel on the much more chill end. Covers a lot of obscure games as well as mainstream ones. Probably best known for his excellent Deadly Premonition LP from almost 15 years ago now, has moved more into doing blind playthroughs. He has a small (rarely get over 10k views) but very dedicated fan base.
Favourite series of his are Deadly Premonition, Illbleed, Life and Times of Bully Demise and Laser Lords.
MadelineJamesWorldbuilds a channel about in deep world building (featuring things like where various rock formations would be located)
Ugh as if! a podcast mostly about art. The hostess is an actual comrade.
Angela’s Symposium talks about various forms of mysticism.
Monstergarden an artist talking about his world-building process.
Zane Parker does reviews about horror classics with a very comedic twist.
historic_ly does long form podcasts reading several works of lenin.